Why I get my entertainment via BitTorrent

Objective morality doesn't have to be derived from god or a spiritual being, or feeling; there can be objective morality that we deduce, or interpret or find, depending on how you look at it, through reason. From a limited set of axiom (which I referred to in another post in this thread), we can derive objective morality. The problem with morality is epistemological, not about its nature. We just don't know yet how to deduce what is moral in some circumstances. Maybe we will some day, we'll see; but that morality is subjective seems to be a commonly held belief but one that usually doesn't stand up long when one examines the consequences. When enough people think that it is morally OK to execute all those with hair growing out of their ears, is it? No it's not, and it never is. It's not because it violates the right to life of those people (leaving aside issues of death penalty etc).

People often argue to me 'but if there are no people, there is no morality, so morality has to be subjective' (actually someone said that to me last week right after saying how her Christianity was such an important part of her identity - I think she didn't quite get the memo on the nature of morality in her church, but I digress). My point is that morality always exists; it's like the fundamentals of mathematics or the laws of nature. Would Pythagoras's theorem hold even if there would never have existed humans who formulated it? Of course it would.

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. "

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.

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.