In a sense, though, information is different from land (the original subject of property law) and even from personal property, because what makes land valuable is being able to control it to the exclusion of other people, and whereas the value of information is frequently increased by disseminating it to a larger number of people. Sometimes the person or entity that thinks of itself as the owner of the information wants to charge rent to more people for access to it, but usually (something like blackmail would be an exception) a song is more valuable if it's popular than if only two people want to listen to it, etc.

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Also, you've got positive ownership ("I have access to this") versus negative ownership ("You don't have access to this"), and the network effect ("The more people have facebook accounts the more useful facebook is").

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That type of personal ownership is only one model. For example, a tribe may collectively own foraging rights, or a Duke may control a province with Imperial remit, but have no personal right to it. And so on. These models of ownership are much older than our society, and endured for thousands of years. Our modern ideas of property 'I have access'/ 'you don't have access' are real, but they are not fundamental.

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Positive/negative rights aren't necessarily personal.

Collectively owned foraging rights may also be positive ("We are allowed to forage in these woods") or negative ("Nobody else may forage in our woods").

The Duke in your example clearly has no ownership of the province, he merely stewards it for the true owner.

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If rights are not personal, and the true owner is a concept 'the empire' then I think this illustrates how borad the concept of 'ownership' is. My point - and I'm not sure we are disagreeing - is that we lazily think that the ideas we have 'now' are natural and right, and that change is a new thing, whereas in fact what we have now is only the product of a long line of previous historical changes which will continue forever.

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Oh, I don't think the ideas we have now are natural/right. I firmly believe that the concept of "property" is, like all human rights/ideals, something that exists in people's heads, and will thus vary over time/place/culture/context.

The point about "positive" and "negative" rights was nothing to do with personal property - it was merely to illustrate two of the axes that rights tend to be split down, and was entirely in response to executrix talking about the difference between information and physical objects when it came to "owning" them.

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I was being combative where there was no combat. Basically I'm feudal.

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Having been involved in maaaaany arguments where they were saying "X=Y" and I was saying "No, you blithering idiot, Y=X" I can share your pain :->

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Also, I feel I can get stuck in with you and executrix because you both like a bit of a debate.

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Absolutely :->

If I wasn't so busy today I might even have had something useful to say!

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LJ is fun! Most things are so complicated that there can be a debate about the accuracy of someone's descriptions of the nearest toenail, co-existing with a hassle about whether it even makes sense to look at toenails when tusks are far more important, while over in the corner someone says, "Oi, mush! ELEPHANT!"

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As "the most original moralist in England" (Mr. Doolittle, in Pygmalion) said, "That ain't the natural way guv'nor, that's just the middle-class way."

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I don't think land is the original paradigm of property. In a nomadic society property is 'chattels' - that is, moveables. In an imperial economy land is sub-owned within the imperium. In feudalism landed property is an obligation. It's only in an expanding colonial society that land is owned outright like other types of property. That is my argument in any case.

So, what I'm saying is, there isn't a core definition of ownership, which modern information society has subverted. I'm saying every society has a different way of conceiving of ownership, which reflects the conditions of that society. Ours isn't more primal or natural than others.

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Helprin, from the short NPR blurb I looked at, sounds just exactly like every other person who has made his way to a promised land (published noveldom, moved-to-Portland-dom, bought-a-beach-house-dom) and said, "Okay, I'm here now. Shut the doors."

Now that I have mine, it's not only okay, but imperative, that we prevent trespass by anyone who was in line behind me.

I realize that's not precisely what he's saying, but there IS an element in all these copyright arguments of defining sacred territory (publication, recording by a real record label, etc.) and declaring their works more special as a result. The arguments sound like they're about profit and ownership, but they feel like they're about bein' in the Sekrit Klubhous.

Sorry--not totally coherent here, just riffing in a first-cup-of-coffee way. Will read your other links from work.

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Someone on metafilter pointed out that as a writer he ought to be paying intellectual property rights to the inventors of ink and paper.

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Locke's Second Treatise on Government is the intellectual source of many modern ideas of property rights, most especially the libertarians. It's a deeply flawed account of property rights generally, but in this context one of the most interesting things about it is the contortions he has to go through to make his theory justify Europeans sailing to North America and taking land from the people that already live there.

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Yes, absolutely. There was a libertarian - gosh was it a presentation or an animation I forget - a thing going round recently, which was essentially an uncredited exposition of Locke's argument on property.

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I trust the author paid royalties to Locke's descendants.

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Oh, here it is. I haven't read Locke for nearly thirty years so I could be wrong.

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It was sufficiently tedious that I didn't make it all the way through, but it looks to be more Nozick than Locke. Still bollocks, though.

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