I like this bloggage about artists and copyright and I’m chastened that substantive issues of IP are part of the second year of my degree and not the current one, which must be dealt with first. So I can’t really respond to it meaningfully. But I can try.

I think the institution of property is amongst the greatest of man’s inventions. It’s certainly an invention; there is no natural phenomenon that gives rise to it or takes advantage of it. Animals and cavemen had a crude concept of territory, but until the invention of the fence, or the wall, or the trench, had no clear way to mark out what belonged to whom. Possession of objects - a uniquely human activity - was refined when humans developed the ability to defend it, with a clinically precise line being drawn between the individual and the world with the invention of the gun. That’s yours, this ain’t.

Property allows markets, trade and wealth creation. Ownership encourages good stewardship of those things owned because people have a direct incentive to look after them. Property is a decentralising force. Property gives you privacy. And most importantly, property is the lure and the reward for hard work.

Marxists give a lot of stick to the idea of property, promising instead a utopia where everyone will have everything they want. 50 million skulls later, Marxists are few and far between, but their legacy lives on in the milder, modern leftisms. Progressives and their goals are marginally more ethically sound, but they have inherited the irrational distrust of property, and the Free software/culture movement draws a great deal of support from these collectivist doctrines.

Freedom, openness, sharing, remixing, and redistributing are all laudable ideals of the Free culture movement, but I think they are ahistorical in an important way which I lack the data to prove: they skirt around the reasons for turning ideas into property in the first place, and thereby ignore the (purported) fact that the market for ideas has been spectacularly, phenomenally, unbelievably successful beyond the wildest dreams of its instigators.

Current copyright laws are bad, and getting worse, but their successes are invisible and not to be underestimated. Real statistics elude me, but for a flavour of what I wish to say, consider the relative creative output of countries with strong copyright protection (the USA, Europe, Japan) and collectivist Russia and China.