Do you also agree that government should not enforce if I borrow your bike while you are not using it if I return it? If not how is that different? You still have the bike and you werent using it while I borrowed it - you just didn’t know I was borrowing it

In universe of perfectly slippery spherical cows, I wouldn't mind. However, in this universe bikes experience wear, I wouldn't be able to spontaneously decide to use it, etc.

You writing a shitty knock off Harry Potter novel "wears" on the brand. Just think your favorite book, movie, or music and think if you would enjoy it if there was really no way to know what was real work and what was just some copy-cat or straight up scammer selling rubbish. Now it is easy; you can not publish your Harry Potter novel due to copyright.

Put it in another way: to become a author in a world where copyright is not a thing is pretty much impossible. Either you have to sell your book digitally with draconian DRM - and you will still get your book stolen or you have to own your own print shop, because if you send your book to any publisher they can just take your work and publish it as their own.

And let's be real the amount your bike wears out from me riding it to the shop and back is so negligible that it won't make a difference in the life span of the bike.

There are good reasons to have copyright - however I do not like how long the copyright is. I've stated it before that in my mind good copyright would be something like 10-20 years or life time of the author whatever comes later. This would allow any creative to hold the right to their world/characters/whatever until they are gone and it wouldn't discourage them from publishing in their old age since even after they have passed their families would still benefit from the works for sometime.

I agree with the business use-case for copyright, trademark, intellectual property, it is a useful collective agreement. To the extent that it is useful.

I thought about this a bit more, and I agree that it is useful that giant software automatons and conglomerates should not get the benefit human creativity until they pass down the value to the creators. Automation should mean less work for everyone, not hyper-profiteering for the few.

My bike is real property. Your thoughts are not.

Tell me you have never done anything creative in your life without telling me you have never done anything creative in your life.

Implying I’d be willing to bend my principles when they don’t benefit me, which I wouldn’t. That’s what makes us different.

Press X to doubt

Should you be fined for copying an NFT or do your intellectual “property” rules only apply when they benefit you?

What does "copying an NFT" mean?

1. You mean copying the image that the NFT points to?

    The copyright of that image still exists even with the NFT. So existence of NFT doesn't change anything about the picture's copyright. With or without NFT you can not sell prints of the image or use it however you want without permission of the copyright holder.

2. You mean copying the actual NFT i.e. somehow taking over the block in the chain and assigning it to you?

    That is a kin to stealing. Why does it matter if the property is digital or physical? This is the kind of mental gymnastics kids use to justify their pirating of entertainment. "I only *copied* this album, I didn't steal it, the artist still has theirs" is such 14 years old's take on the issue. If you don't want to pay for the media you are consuming then don't pay, but then you also shouldn't consume it. This kind of take just shows more how some people haven never created anything of value, yet they want to extract every bit of value from the society.

It sure would be nice if we lived in a world where copyright and patents weren't necessary, but people try to take advantage of everything and anything, so to protect innovation and creativity we need copyright and patents.

There is no such thing as private property. It's a fiction enforced with the threat of violence. It's even fairly recent as a concept.

If we agree that private property should exist, "it's not real" is not a good argument for why intellectual property shouldn't exist. Not all violations of private property have to be stealing. If I sleep in the empty house you own, that is trespass even if I don't cause any physical damage. If I tend to the garden of the summer home you own and eat the fruit that would have spoiled by the time you came by, I still violated your property rights even if I left the garden in a better condition than I found it.

If we abolish intellectual property, why should we keep money, which at this point is entirely virtual? Why should we allow stocks, which represent a partial ownership claim in a legal entity that lays claim on other property? Why should we allow corporations, which are afforded similar rights as real persons but don't physically exist? Why should we allow ownership of land which is unused, homes that aren't lived in, produce that isn't consumed? Why should we allow private property at all?

If you want to abolish private property, I'm all on board with you, but if you think intellectual property is tangibly different you need to take a closer look at how private property came about and what it even means.

Private property !== personal possessions. I, for one, don't agree private property should exist, just like intellectual property. There is no place in the future for such concepts, they all feel quite antiquated.

What about possessionless property rights, that are only utilised to enforce theft and robbery laws?

Am I physically touching your painting when I copy it? If not, then your attempt at equating physical property to thoughts is nonsense. We both believe in physical property, however arbitrarily invented it is. Only you believe in intellectual property, and I’m willing to bet you aren’t even consistent with it. Should you be fined for saving an NFT?

I don’t want the government to be involved in virtual money. Stocks are a claim to physical property, corporations are (or should be) a convenient way to address physical property pooled together from multiple people. The rest of your comment can be addressed with the homestead principle - if I didn’t take it by force you can’t take it from me by force.

So if I trash your house that's cool? You still have your house, it's just in a different entropy state.

Or maybe one particular state had more value than another?

So maybe when other people value different entropic states over others, perhaps that has value?

> Am I physically touching your painting when I copy it? If not, then your attempt at equating physical property to thoughts is nonsense. We both believe in physical property, however arbitrarily invented it is. Only you believe in intellectual property, and I’m willing to bet you aren’t even consistent with it. Should you be fined for saving an NFT?

I'm interpreting your view as property only applies to physical things or abstractions of physical things. Is there a name for this theory? I'd say I subscribe to the labor theory or property and it's interesting to think about this from another perspective.

There's a couple cases I'm having trouble with. For example, is an ip address property? Seems so because it represents a physical scheme about the routing of ip packets. Similarly an email address or physical address seems like property. If any of these were replicated/spoofed by someone else, they would disrupt the ability to physically route whatever (bits, packages). Ok.

But then what about trademarks? In some ways those are 'pull' addresses - I go to the store, and buy a Coke and I'm expecting that thing labeled Coke to be the physical product I expect, not some spoofed version of Coke. But that label and what not is just a picture, and the original picture wasn't harmed in any way when the spoofed version was created. Is this concept just not allowed and we accept that inefficiency? Or maybe trademarks are allowed as property because they represent the physical concept of the systems the Coke corporation has put in place to create and produce Coke.

But if that's the case, then what about a non-trademark painting? If I go to the store and see a painting by an artist I like, and want to support them and the physical systems the went into generating that painting, and not be spoofed should that be supported?

(Though maybe all this could be solved with a QR code or DOP label or something. Though somewhat inconvenient to have to robustly check that all the time).

Honestly, it seems like if you accept any contract law you implicitly must accept copyright law. Consider the following contracts:

I agree to harvest your crops in exchange for 50% of the yield.

I agree to sing if you give me supper.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and not record me.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and subscribe to all the rules of copyright law.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and subscribe to all the rules of copyright law and all people in your jurisdiction also subscribe to copyright law. (And then some folks who wanted a singer got together and passed a law that satisfied the singer's requirements).

All these seem reasonable to extensions of the previous and it seems like we've ended up at the latter.

You might say 'well I didn't agree to that contract', but there are plenty of things in the world that we are bound by that individuals that we didn't explicitly agree to. I didn't explicitly agree to not dump motor oil in the ocean, or hunt deer on a certain day or that 50 decibels as the bound for noise during the night, or that children of age 12 can't vote, or that I have to wear pants in public.

You might argue that the last step is invalid, and instead the world should be a place where individuals can pick and choose which laws they are interested in subscribing too. I don't really want to put much effort into that path because my intuition is that's equivalent to anarchy, but maybe there's an alternate argument here.

So it seems to have a world w/o copyright law, you have to throw out contract law, or convince everyone to stop somewhere on that chain, perhaps not to make the contracts that mimic copyright law, or make a law making such contracts invalid. The later two options seem fairly artificial, impinging on folks self determination. So we're left with having to eliminate contract law, which seems pretty limiting.

> Am I physically touching your painting when I copy it? If not, then your attempt at equating physical property to thoughts is nonsense. We both believe in physical property, however arbitrarily invented it is. Only you believe in intellectual property, and I’m willing to bet you aren’t even consistent with it. Should you be fined for saving an NFT?

I want to hear you respond to this, as I'm about to respond to you. I see no reason to continue if you're just going to avoid anything I say while yourself trying everything to see what will stick.

It's not alien that I believe property excludes thoughts, as you're trying to make it seem. Most people agree with me, until it wouldn't benefit them to do so. Again, I demonstrate this with your presumed support of IP for artists and opposition to IP for NFTs. You would argue against IP for NFTs the same way I'm arguing against you right now, the only difference is that I'm consistent.

IP addresses are not property. Neither are trademarks. We can argue about the slightly related topic of whether they deserve government protections anyways, but it wouldn't be because they're property.

No, copyright and contract law have little to do with each other and you're making a giant leap of logic. Namely, I can find a way to obtain your copyrighted content without making any agreement with you, and still be held legally liable for it. Torrenting copyrighted content someone else broke the rules to seed is one such example. On the other hand, I can't be punished for listening to you sing for someone else in exchange for food, even if I didn't give you any food myself.

Yes there's plenty of things that we don't explicitly agree to and I'm in favour of keeping that list as short as possible. I don't agree that some of the things you listed should be implicit. Nobody is perfectly consistent, but at a baseline I'm far more consistent than you are.

Re nfts, I'm kinda not clear on the question, I think because we don't have a clear societal statement of what an nft is or is trying to accomplish. Literally what an nft is an entry containing with a url on a Blockchain with certain properties around non fungability. Saving that has almost no issue because distributing the bits in a blockchain is one of its fundamental purposes. Now saving the file referenced by the nft starts to become more interesting. My interpretation is that we should respect do whatever the rights holder wishes. If they want to allow saving, great, if not, then don't save. The problem seems to be the rights assignment of nfts aren't really communicated or standardized afaik. Some feel like the nft should represent the ownership rights of the work, some feel like they should represent the ownership rights of an instance which may or may not transfer the rights of the original owner. Some feel it should have nothing to do with rights transfer and instead just be it's own thing. Any of these stances (or others) are fine with me, and if any disallowed saving that seems totally fine. It would be nice if whatever scheme/contract was either standardized or easily identified for each work/nft. Images on the internet already have this problem and systems like creative commons attempt to help, something like nft-commons could really help make clear what rights are implied by the nft and thus which images referenced by nfts could be saved.

So re ipaddresses what characteristic differentiates the from property? For them to be useful it would seem they must have pretty much all the same characteristics.

I agree there could be a world where people could torrent whatever w/o repercussion, in the same way there could be a world where we didn't have to wear pants. It's not where we are, but we can imagine and reason about it.

But even in such a world, should a singer not be allowed to make a contract where they sing but won't be recorded, or a contract where they are recorded only if the folks follow copyright law? Effectively isn't this what many trade agreements are, one country will give another favorable trade conditions X in exchange for Y which includes 'your population can't torrent'. The country voluntarily does so because X is worth it. In fact elsewhere in this thread someone said exactly this happened in their country. Should this contract not be allowed, why not?

So I feel like even if you started in a world that allowed torrenting, if you allowed contract law, you would inevitably evolve to a world that disallowed torrenting, because that's a contract some people would want.