No. You can’t. You can sell the act of sharing (labour) or materials with information (goods). But without communication (which is the thing being sold) information can’t be transferred.
Non sequitur. The human species [sic] treated the world as flat, and the stars in the night sky as gods. That didn’t make it so.
Non sequitur. According to you, only the human species can assert things, not Austrians.
Indeed, which is why the statist IP regime is going down.
Maxliberty, for once, I actually partially agree with you. However, for clarification, ideas can only be owned until they become public. Once they become public, everyone has free access to them. For example, one can own air. A person can bottle some of it up. But once it is released, it is not owned anymore. However, ideas are different in that once they have been released, no one can bottle it back up.
That analogy doesn’t make any sense. You can’t encapsulate an idea the same way you can encapsulate air. Ideas can presented as writing on paper, but you can’t encapsulate them in writing.
What is more, the state treats some information as it were the state’s (financial information, business records, Internet records, medical records, etc).
It’s true when you copy the files, but it is not true when you hack into the computer. Hacking the computer mean illegally manipulating the computer, which itself is tangible and private property. However, the implication is that the hacker cannot copy the files without first illegally manipulating the computer.
I didn’t know that you necessarily manipulate by hacking, but anyway, would hacking be legitimate if it didn’t involve manipulating, i.e., if I could enter your computer and copy your files, without leaving any traces?
The idea is encapsulated in the head of the person that has the idea. I think we are just talking semantics. If I know about a recipe for food, that no one else knows about, would you agree that you could pay me to divulge the recipe to you? It seems to me, an idea is what is being traded for the money.
Accessing my computer without my permission, is accessing my computer without my permission. Is it OK for you to walk into my house without my permission and grab some gold statue, just because I did not lock the door?
I’ve done a lot of study with computers and I continue doing so. I have to say that with a computer, that is currently a physical impossibility. In order to read any information from it, it must be physically manipulated in some way or at some level. From what I understand, the two can’t be separated.
But for the sake of argument, we’ll stick with the idea that information can be taken without anything being manipulated.
I’d like to know how the situation with the computer would be different from this one:
Lincoln programs a drone to go into someone’s house, read a book, remember the info, and leave without a trace. It reports back to Lincoln what it had found. It can read the book, enter, and leave the property without changing any of the property.
I believe it would be trespassing. Sure, Lincoln himself didn’t cross the property line. But his property did. We can argue that electrons as they occur in nature are not property because they are abundant. But the electricity for the signals is his shaping of the electrons, and so he owns that bit of electricity as it passes into the computer and causes some information to be retrieved into his possession.
And to even further confuse the issue, the electrons don’t even go all the way from his computer to the other person’s computer! Instead, electrical signals propagate through wires kind of like a wave. So the wave is something of his creation. If he were to cause an earthquake on his property, the energy would send out waves to the neighbors property, altering their property.
Pretty interesting topic, though. I need to think more on this.
But you’re not actually trading away the brain cells that contain your idea, nor the abstraction. You’re trading away an audible expression of it. That is, your performing labor, not selling and abstract good.
If a person can’t own electrons, then a person cannot own the electrons that compose his body. That means that someone could build an electron remover machine and remove the electrons from your body, and render you… (that’s where my physics education ends).