Everything political is rooted in morality, and while it is easy to point out political challenges on the topic, intellectual property is ethically an unambiguously good concept.
While I don’t think all IP should be abolished, I think in general there is too much of it, protected for too long, and society would be better off getting rid of patents and dramatically downsizing copyright to at most a few decades of protection.
(And yes I have thought a lot on this matter. The evidence behind patents being overall beneficial is weak, and there is no effective societal argument for the current copyright terms.)
It was also created at a time when copying work was almost as hard and expensive as creating it.
"The Most Powerful Idea in the World" basically makes the case that intellectual property is what enabled the Industrial Revolution. I won't try to summarize or defend the entire thing here, but I think it makes a very compelling case that the notion of "owning ideas as property" was the thing that made Britain unique (among other factors of course) and led to runaway technological explosion. It points out how in earlier times, inventors were literally killed for coming up with better methods that threatened some established system. So there is a big difference between art and technology there, and while I think debating the merits of copyright as it pertains to art is valid (and 100% agree it's overdone in our current system), I'm not convinced the current issues are serious enough to undermine the entire concept of intellectual property.
And without any form of copyright it would have gone "hey $RECORD_COMPANY here's this cool jingle I made" and they'd say "yeah we think so too, we'll use that and compensate you $0."
Way better.
Politics and economics don't have anything to do with morality. It's about power. The moral fairytailes are there to justify whatever the state of affairs are. When these change, new fairytales justifying them will be adopted.
If right to property is a God given right, why the hell I as a atheist should give a damn?
"God given" means "natural". [Natural rights does not require a god](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...)
And if your argument ("... god given ... atheist ... etc.) can be copy-pasted into a valid defence of arbitrary evil (I like to use Hitler for a concrete example, but avoid it in public because some subset of people erroneously thinks that is an automatic fallacy), then it is trivial in the sense that it doesn't add anything to the discussion, regardless of your opinion or pov.
They were literally just invented few hundred years ago. And have even changed since then (owning another human being was somehow a natural/god given right). Humans have organized (and keep on organizing) without any such conception for at least tens of thousands of years, but suddenly its natural?
Who is the absolute arbiter of "evil"? USA of course holds itself as a force for good, and e.g. islamism as evil. Islamists do the opposite. Very rarely anybody thinks themselves as evil, but readily point out evil in others.
This is in no way to support islamism, or USA. Just that morality is just mostly an arbtrary justification for whatever somebody wants to or doesn't want to get done.
We can discuss the merits and shortcomings of e.g. ownership based on its societal consequences just fine without conjuring metaphysics.
You can argue it from political necessity.
Some kind of property rights are necessary for the operation of any social group. Even in a communist society you can't have the air force stealing land from the navy, or the transport department taking electricity from hospitals, or neighbours taking each others food allocations.
There needs to be some kind of organised transfer of property or you get chaos.
Some kind of systems to allocate scarce resources is needed. This doesn't have to be property. Access to e.g. the moon and earth's orbits and international waters and polar regions have systems of allocation, but they are not property.
Those arguments can be incorrect without entailing all arguments from political necessity are false.
I can incorrectly argue a justification of the flat earth theory from physics - but that would discredit my own intellect rather than the subject of physics.
> Some kind of systems to allocate scarce resources is needed. This doesn't have to be property.
I agree not everything has to be property, but some things must. Essentially anything that's both important and "stealable" needs to be protected by property rights of some kind.
Regardless of how your food and water come into your possession (trade, charity, gov allocation), it's necessary that some of it remains in your possession for you to consume.
> I can incorrectly argue a justification of the flat earth theory from physics - but that would discredit my own intellect rather than the subject of physics.
Do you mean the right to (certain very specific form of) property is somehow an empirically shown fact like the geometry of the earth?
Am I right in guessing that you have inclination towards praxeology?
> I agree not everything has to be property, but some things must.
Why do some things must? Because it leads to more desirable consequences than other options, or because it is some metaphysical truth you're somehow privy to?
The first kind of argument is fine, the latter is just blunt rhetorics. I don't see why the former should be spoiled with the latter.
> Am I right in guessing that you have inclination towards praxeology?
Yes for both. I’ve not formalised it but I suspect we can a draw a line from philosophy -> game theory -> evolutionary dynamics -> socially stable systems of “rights”
Also, I don't believe ownership rights like we have currently lead to stable societies. This is kind of core of Marx's critique of capitalism.
But we do have clear systems of who gets power, through what means, and what they can do with it. The various classes of society have a relatively peaceful system of competing with one another.
I’m writing from a British perspective but it largely applies to most developed countries.
From a Finnish perspective, where ownership rights are somewhat lesser, the British system's trajectory didn't seem particularly stable when I lived there 2019-2020, and looks even less so now.
Britain never seems stable at first glance. Read a newspaper from 5, 50, 150 or 250 years ago and they'll all be lamenting economic uncertainty, geopolitical dilemmas and social injustice. Yet in that time no revolutions have killed more than 1% of the population, long term economic growth has averaged couple percentage points annually and nobody has successfully invaded the Islands.
I should not be coerced to give output of my labor (whether physical or mental) to others based on some burocrat’s allocation system or my neighbor’s wishes. That would be immoral.
I should not be coerced not to enter a piece of land just because somebody made a contract with somebody who killed or evicted by force the people (and other animals) who previously inhabited the land. That would be immoral, right?