Quote from: Hawker on September 02, 2011, 06:42:02 AM

Thats the way life works. If you want to restrict yourself to physical property, consider visiting these places; Eastern Turkey, Israel and Northern Cyprus. In each you have prosperous successful people who own their own land. They have title papers and by any definition of ownership, this is theirs. But across the borders, there are other people who have title deeds to the same property and in the cases of the Greek Cypriots, often still have the keys of the doors of the houses they left behind as they fled for their lives in 1974.

My question to you is this; which owners are the "real" owners. My personal view is that ownership is something that comes from the society and if you can't enforce your claim, then you don't actually own anything. Do you have some less "naked and ugly" view?

The part in bold is factually correct, but the preceding clause is not; it is possible for those with enough might to enforce "ownership" claims against the wishes of most members of society (e.g., copyright extension, bank bailouts, deepwater drilling, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, and a host of tragedies of the commons).

However:

I want everyone to witness the rhetorical retreat of Hawker, who began by claiming that force ought to be initiated against those who discredit the concept of intellectual property, and now merely notes that force is used in an essentially arbitrary fashion by people who purport to act on behalf of "society".

There are lots of nasty things that people do. If your defense of a position is that you can find people willing and able to employ violence upon those who don't share it, then I suppose chattel slavery only became wrong after the Enlightenment... and let us hope that "society" never again condone with their collective might outright ownership of peoplerather, let us push "society" into further abandoning even the watered-down serfdom that subjugates everyone under a monopoly government.

Which brings me to a direct answer of your request. I advocate that people not employ force against those who implement the ideas of others with their own materials, though they may publicly or privately shame, censure, or ostracize the "pirates" if so inclined. It is a specialization of the more general principle that people ought always repair the damage caused when they escalate the level of force. The more this ideal is adhered to, the less ugly the world will be.