Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness!
by
FredericBastiat
on 29/08/2011, 23:03:15 UTC
Don't confuse copying with taking. If I copy your hairstyle, I haven't taken anything from you. You don't suddenly become bald. The only thing you don't have is the ability to profit but that was never something you owned anyways. The fact you can profit off of something is a function of everyone else valuing what you have to offer. You aren't owed a profit just because you feel that way.

Well said. No one is entitled to a profit.

It seems there are two ways you can "profit"; both of which are still personal opinions, best I can tell. Profit and value are similar abstract mental constructs.

1) Profit arises from the opinion that if whatever objects or services you exchanged with another, is, in your mind, of greater value than that property which you previously possessed, you had a gain.

2) In a similar vein, if in the process of modifying the composition of property you already own (the raw physical material), you believe the property conditionally changed for the better, you also profited.

Does profit require human-to-human interchange to qualify?