Quote from: Hawker on August 29, 2011, 09:24:18 PM

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 of 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 other people have no right to create structures to encourage research.

I guess if we're going to pick nits, a butterfly flapping it's wings in Brazil will affect me. In fact, a butterfly thinking about flapping it's wings in Brazil also affects me. Albeit negligible, but true.

No, wrong. Society doesn't want things. The people in society want things. Society is an abstraction. Individuals want things. Some individuals have similar beliefs and wants and they organize in an attempt to achieve some of their goals, other don't.

I'm not attacking anybody. That would imply I'm applying a force (as in Newtons or Pounds). Ever heard of F = ma? You know, the physics stuff? As in their intial state or conditions are changed because I imparted energy into their environment where one didn't exist before? Lets not make something from nothing.

I also don't deprive the researcher of his profit, the market, or more specifically the individuals which comprise the market, decide whether or not the researcher directly profits or not. For the right price...

You could have the best product in town, but if nobody buys it, whatever you've got invested becomes a loss to you until the market changes its mind.

I'm only entitled to the property physically in my possession. I cannot take the physical objects others own from them, and they shouldn't take the objects in my possession from me. Simple as that.

Value is in the eye of the beholder, and only measureable by the owner/traders at the moment of exchange.

Everybody learns from everybody. We don't live or learn in a vacuum. We all stand on the shoulders of others work. By that logic, were I the first man to invent mathematics I could dominate the world as they would owe me nearly everything they interact with.

Of course your going to disagree with me because some esoteric law says that algorithms don't count. Okay, I'll give you that one. But what if I was the first man to walk out of a cave and invent the first house. Is that good enough for you?

Where ya gonna draw the line?