> Just don't expect me to take absurdities like delusional people thinking they own numbers seriously.
The same governments that let you 'own' physical items are the ones who say you can 'own' IP as well.
If they didn't - and didn't back it up with force - you wouldn't 'own' anything at all. Cherry picking which version of ownership is 'absurd' is an exercise in futility, since it's not up to you.
Nah. I own physical things by literally holding onto them. Keeping them inside my property to which only I have the keys. Defending that property by force if necessary. Government doesn't have to "let" me own anything, it merely recognizes and formalizes the de facto reality of things. Meanwhile we have these people with their made up delusions of ownership of ideas and all the contradictions inherent in that, and I'm supposed to pretend it's not absurd?
Whether or not the world conforms to their made up copyright reality isn't really up to them either. The simple fact is: information, once discovered, is infinitely copyable. No amount of lobbying is ever gonna change that. People are still gonna train AI models with "their" data and there's nothing they can do about it short of destroying free computing as we know it by making it so we can only execute software they approve. Surely you don't want that, fellow Hacker News user, given that such tyranny is the antithesis of everything the word "hacker" stands for.
> Government doesn't have to "let" me own anything,
You seem to be confusing possession with ownership.
Ownership is the social relationship by which you exert control independent of immediate possession, but you’ve just described how you can maintain possession.
Yup. By his logic, if a thief holds someone at gunpoint and takes their property then they now own x. Furthermore, if they are then caught, by his logic, that property shouldn't be returned to the victim because the thief now owns it apparently.
Lol. They literally do own that property. They'll even sell it off for drugs or whatever as if they did own it. It's a very rare case that police will get off their asses and retrieve "your" stolen property. You can give them a GPS signal to the property and they still won't do it. Believing in this "posession/ownership" dichotomy is just as delusional as believing in imaginary intellectual property. It's just a flat out denial of the reality of things.
You know what's funny? In my country, Apple's security is more effective at deterring criminals than any of this "ownership" crap. A stolen iPhone is basically a brick that's worthless to anyone else. So they'd rather target Android phones instead which they can more easily reset and pass off as some used phone they own.
Do people own property? Do they even have money? Do you own a license to your software? If it is all just on paper or on a screen, it's just numbers. The entire system is make-believe. If you choose not to believe in intellectual property, you must also acknowledge that other aspects of capitalism also do not actually exist and is a shared delusion.
However, the shared delusion makes the world go round as-is.
OK, "copyright bad", "intellectual property rights bad", so what's the alternative?
> If you choose not to believe in intellectual property, you must also acknowledge that other aspects of capitalism also do not actually exist and is a shared delusion.
I already do. Dollars? It's just paper, not even backed by anything. People believe in it so it has value for the time being. It will literally go to zero if people stop believing in it though.
It was hard for me to accept these truths. I don't post them here lightly.
> However, the shared delusion makes the world go round as-is.
People who choose to believe in delusions don't get to complain when reality inevitably comes creeping in.
> OK, "copyright bad", "intellectual property rights bad", so what's the alternative?
Post scarcity. Automate everything and provide abundance, eliminating the need for an economy to begin with.
