Quote from: FredericBastiat on August 29, 2011, 08:56:00 PM

The only reason "society" has any say in an individuals life is because collectively they have more force than a person does individually.

I only fear for my life because "society" thru it's superior weaponry, not necessarily it's justice, convinces me to comply.

If society decides tomorrow that yellow shirts are the "right" color, do you honestly think I'm going to wear anything other than the color yellow? Duh, of course not!

Just because you create intellectual property "rights" doesn't make them automagically justifiable. Just because you spent a million dollars or one dollar on an idea has nothing to do with me. Don't make your stuff about me and mine.

I would like to think justice is well defined and is constrained only to those who provoke or initiate acts of aggression against others. If it isn't that, then you can make justice anything you want and there would be no end to the violence you could commit.

Collectivist attitudes and beliefs are extremely dangerous thinking.

Wrong. It directly affects you. If a society wants medicines to be developed, and it chose to use intellectual property as the way to encourage that development, then you are aggressively attacking that society if you illegally copy the medicines and resell them depriving the researcher of his profit. And from your list of principles, you seem to think you are entitled to do just that!

You are free not to use the medicine. You are free to agitate to change the law so that investment in research is not protected by intellectual property. But you are not free to take the result of the research, copy it and sell it for your own profit. Its value was not created by you. Why should you be able to profit from it? Its very aggressive to say that you have some ideology that says people have no right to create structures to encourage research.