From: Justin Corwin (thesweetestdream@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Dec 12 2000 - 18:19:21 MST
i believe the key to property rights lies in whether or not the person can
be considered to have originated or "paid" for the property in question. by
sacrificing some quantity( work, other property, time, age, etc) you
effectively create a balance of exchange. to deny the person property they
have sacrificed for disrupts this balance. just as attributing property
rights beyond their sacrifice also disrupts the balance. the question then
becomes, what is a proper valuation of comparative property? i think the
result, upon a proper valuation, will not be that some things cannot be
owned, but that some things are simply far too valuable for the average
human to be able to sacrifice anything to balance it.
>And of course the fundamental right to property grows out of one's right
>to one's own life and to make one's own decisions and to live with the
>consequences. If one has no right to property then there is no right to
>one's life or to the outcome of one's decisions.
>
>I do believe that property in many realms of ideas, especially software,
>is theft however. Or not exactly theft, but that applying property
>notions to software diminishes us and our abilities.
>
>- samantha
informantional, or idea property rights seem rather unclear at the moment.
people feel that they did work for the idea, so they should have a certain
ownership of it. however, i believe that principles and formulae exist
whether we "discover" them or not. so a person cannot rightly be the owner
of something simply be finding it.
to apply the current law in information ownership, columbus would have had
property rights to the western hemisphere, as the indigineous poeple
obviously didn't have any legislative support, they would have been unable
to protest this. i don't think that discovery means ownership, but
development does give you the right to implement it first. just as racing to
the store faster than anyone else, allows you to get the best pickings. it's
an inherent right, and not an invented or supported one.
to return to my earlier point, i think that it also supports samantha's
point that informational ownership is harmful. because in a proper
valuation, design, formulae, and processes can be, and often are,
fantastically valuable, meaning people would need to go to equally fantastic
lengths to "own" them.
in a properly valued society. which it isn't.
c'est la vie.
justin
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