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0 pointsalexvoda3y ago0 comments

Do not confuse IP with secret information.

The existence or absence of IP laws does not affect your capability to have secret information in any way.

Patents, one of the types of IP, was actually designed to encourage holders of secrets to release them. But the ability to hold secrets is completely unaffected.

Also, just because you hold a secret does not mean anyone owes you anything. You may sell a secret and you always could regardless of IP.

What IP allows you to do is, after you've made a secret public, demand compensation every time other people share it among themselves.

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Hasu3y ago

I'm not talking about current IP laws, exactly. The parent's claim was that physical property laws are "natural" and IP laws are not. I'm saying the concept of property is not natural and some ideas and information share key properties with physical objects, but the larger thrust is that all property rights are constructed and enforced by the state, it's all a shared consensus and where we draw the lines isn't because of some inherent difference between ideas and objects.

alexvodaOP3y ago

Just as explained by Retric ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860308 ), while property rights may not be "natural" (define natural in this context), the idea of property does arise naturally in both humans and animals as a direct consequence of scarcity.

Scarcity and the lack thereof is fundamental difference between the physical and the digital.

A secret can be scarce but the more copies are made the less scarce it is.

Encoded information (either written text -language is an encoding- or digital information) can be copied losslessly infinitely for a vanishing marginal cost.

Sure, enshrining property rights as law is a human social construction. The goal is to limit the use of force, otherwise everyone has to guard thair own property, gun in hand. But property itself arises naturally.

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