Over at Claire Wolfe's blog, there has been some discussion on the associated forum about intellectual property, one which has been rather heated and divisive.

I contend that "intellectual property rights" are a sham. Intellectual property is not property at all, and the copyright system amounts to fraud.

This is not to say that authors, programmers, composers, and the like ought not to be paid for their creations. They should. The key is that once the agreed-upon price has been paid for that creation, then it no longer belongs to the originator; instead it now belongs to whoever bought it.

In the case of music, for example, a band first puts together a CD, then sells it to a music publisher like a record company. The record company now owns the CD. They produce thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies of that CD, put them in cases with liners, and sell them to record stores. The record stores now own the CDs. Then the individual customer buys a copy of the CD. When all the CDs are sold, they no longer belong to the artist, or to the record company, or to the record store, they belong instead to the individual customers.

"Intellectual Property" sees this differently: it contends that even after the artist has been paid, and the record company has been paid, and the record store has been paid, and the customer owns the CD, that even then the artist still deserves to be paid again should the customer convert the songs to MP3 and make a copy of that CD on his hard drive. Or that the artist should be paid if copies of the songs on that CD are shared over KaZaA or something similar.

Property that, once sold, still belongs to the person who originally owned it, cannot really be called property at all. The practice of selling the same item to many people, while still retaining ownership of that item, can only be called fraud. If I sold a Van Gough painting to one person, then sold the same painting to another person, then sold it again to a third, I could surely not expect to still retain ownership of that painting. I could expect to be charged with fraud instead.

So, suppose I am van Gough, and I sell one of my paintings. The person I sell it to can make 1 copy or 100000, it doesn't matter. He owns the painting. He can sell the copies he makes, as long as the name "van Gough" appears on them. And, he could claim that they were copies of the original; he could not claim that each was the original. None of the copies would be worth as much as the original, as they are copies. In much the same way, an autographed copy of a book is worth more than another copy of the same book.

So as long as the words are not plagarized, as long as the original composer is noted, as long as the credits remain unchanged on a film, there is nothing wrong with sharing any data that you own over the internet.

The proponents of intellectual property would have one believe that once this "property" is sold, that the ownership still remains with the originator, and that the originator must be paid a "royalty" in order to share data this way. This is obviously fraudulent.

And what about the record store, the record company, and all the support companies "affected" by this "lost sale"? Ought they not be compensated as well? Again, They should not, as they have already been paid, as has the originator of the data. Any additional payments to these groups would also be fraudulent.

Government force must be applied to enforce copyright and patent regulations. This is due to the nature of ideas; once an idea is transferred from one mind to the next, ownership of the idea by the original mind is not diminished in any way. Indeed, in some forms of idea transfer (such as teaching), the idea may even be enhanced by the transfer. And really, that is what songs and movies and all patentable and copyrightable material are: ideas. They have no mass, they have no volume, but they do take effort to create. And that effort ought to be rewarded financially, when they sell their idea or collection of ideas the first time. After that, no compensation can morally be expected.

The reason government force is needed to restrict the flow of these ideas is that the duplication costs of these ideas are miniscule compared to the original production costs. So the record companies, the artists, and those with an interest in maintaining "copyright" must use force to get fraudulent extra payment for already-paid-for services.

The lever used to apply this force is a tax on blank cassette tapes, on blank CDs, on blank DVDs, on tape recorders, on CD writers and on DVD writers. This tax is ostensibly returned to the artists who lose "revenue" due to "pirating". In reality, most of this money goes into government coffers, with some doled out to the record companies and movie companies (you know, the very people who make the blank CDs and blank cassette tapes and blank DVDs).

How they distribute the cash must be an exceedingly complex formula: How does one know what percentage of the blank CDs sold will contain a bunch of MP3s, and how many will contain movies? Which songs and which movies? And how many of those CDs will be used to copy one's own 8mm home movies? One can be certain that record companies are not distributing cash to artists not signed to their label.

These taxes are applied to every blank CD sold. This flies in the face of the 5th amendment (compels the customer to be a witness against himself. to plead guilty and pay a fine for "copyright infringement" even if one is copying self-produced material). It and other laws which hinder or prohibit the sharing of files over KaZaA violate the first amendment ("Congress shall make no law....abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press").

Clearly, data that I own, on a CD I bought, is mine, to do with what I will. This is the same for anyone else who buys a product like a book or magazine or CD or DVD or what-have-you. Whether these people choose to share this data over KaZaA, or to make a second copy for their own use, or to put their CDs into a big pile and burn them, is nobody's business but their own. They bought it, it is theirs. And if they want to share data, freedom of speech and freedom of the press guarantee that right.