[gsc] Metaphors in IP 'Property' Dangerous Obfuscation

[R.A. Hettinga]

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At 8:21 AM -0500 11/14/07, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
>I'd say it's only property if you can control who else touches it.


At 1:27 PM +0000 11/14/07, JP May wrote:
>OK, so under that system real estate is out.  copyright and patent is
>out.  All contractual agreeemnts and the like are out.

Nonsense. You can establish cryptographic control of all the above. I can
have a cryptographic key that operates a car, a lock to a house, I can
produce a cryptographically signed document between two keys which a third
key can use to execute a change of ownership from one key to another.

Notice that "identity" is not required in any of those examples.

>Any sort of title (say, share ownership, bank accounts etc) is totally
>out.

The above is *particularly* applicable to share ownership, access to
book-entry accounts, etc. It's called "financial cryptography". :-).

>Your body (ie, your own "right" not to be killed or beaten) is totally
>out.

Rights are protected by force. The three "F"'s are in play here (physics
causes finance causes philosophy).

Call me an existential materialist, if you want, hell, call me anything you
want except late for dinner... :-)

"Rights" are merely the logical consistencies we use to justify how things
happen. And logic is not reality, for instance, logic cannot be both .

>"In hand" property (like "this is my apple" / "this is my
>volkswagen") is completely out for large things (cars, trees, etc).

See above. You can hire people to protect your property.

>Perhaps small physical objects such as plums, pebbles.  iPods.
>
>So, property only applies to plums, pebbles, iPods and other small
>physical objects. Dice, screwdrivers, etc.

digital bearer certificates representing micrograms of precious metals,
digital copies of movies, songs, digital instructions for
numerically-controlled machine tools, surgery procedures, robotic vehicle
and dwelling assembly, etc., tele-operated surgery, or bull-dozery, for
that matter...

;-)

In short, anything that can be digitized and sent over a wire can be
bought, or sold, for cash in instantaneously-cleared auction markets.
That's property.

Anything in meatspace can be either registered with bearer title,
anonymously, with a third party, or, if it's mobile, simply controlled by a
digital key. And force can be hired, for cash, in auction markets, to
protect it.

Remember, finally, that the value of all commodities has been falling,
relative to anything else, since the advent of agriculture, and
exponentially since the advent of mechanization. Furthermore, the price of
manufactured goods has been falling, exponentially, since the advent of
digital automation. The transaction costs of financial information, goods,
and services, has been falling exponentially since the advent of geodesic
communication, and the prices of information goods in general have fallen
even faster than the transaction costs of financial instruments. Bittorent,
for instance, reduces the cost of information distribution to the very
threshold of accounting non-materiality, measured on a per-capita basis.
Barely above the cost of bandwidth, storage, and  computation.


Cheers,
RAH


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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'