Quote from: Mike Christ on April 12, 2013, 06:45:16 AM

Now, let's say I took a string of numbers, letters, and punctuation, and created something that never existed before; couldn't I say I owned it? If this cannot be considered property, what of the patterns that dictate a private key? Couldn't someone own a private key? Though it is intangible, this person is the only one who owns it, and thus, owns the bits which make up a Bitcoin; but perhaps the major flaw in this argument would be, I'm not sharing this key with anybody, therefor it is, in fact, private, as opposed to a novel, which is meant to be read by other people. In other words, if I wrote a novel, and never let anyone else read it, could I then truly own that long string of paragraphs? After all, if I shared my television with the community, it ceases to be private property.

I suppose this is the major dividing line between property and creation. But it is rather funny how people can own another artist's painting.

A private key isn't, itself, property. You want to get technical about it, neither are the coins it accesses. But a private key is the perfect example to explode IP:
Your private key is only "yours" as long as you have the only copy (or have control of all the copies). If you store that private key on a computer, in order to access it, the attacker would need to use your property (the computer) without your permission. This is Trespass.

But let's say you use, instead, a brain wallet. This is where it really starts to explain why IP is a flawed concept. A brain wallet, for those who are not familiar with it, is a wallet that doesn't actually exist. All the wallet file is is a record of your private keys, which allow you to make transactions on the network. A brain wallet stores this information in the form of a passphrase, a long string of words, that, when hashed, make the private key.

So let's say you stored your coins in a brain wallet. That key is absolutely secure unless one of two things happens: You share it with another person, or someone guesses the passphrase. In either case, the other person now has the same access to your coins as you do. They "own" those coins just as validly as you do. If you shared the key, you voluntarily gave ownership of that key to another person. What he does with it after that is up to him, not you. If someone else came up with it independently, then obviously it wasn't a unique enough phrase to be yours and yours alone.

Now let's bring the analogy home: If you come up with a story, and you share that story with someone - in a book, movie, song, or whatever means you use to share it - you've given up ownership of that story. The moment it hits the other person's head, they can do whatever they want with it, because it's theirs just as validly as it is yours, now. Likewise, if they are able to come up with the same story independently, your story was not unique enough to be considered "yours."