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I don't think that's a very strong argument since it applies to a lot of laws that are very much considered acceptable. From trespassing to the entire field of intellectual property.


Trespassing is really the only one I struggle with.

It is without a doubt true that land is a natural commons. Yet in order to make the most efficient use of it it has to be managed privately. When I walk across a field, I am not an aggressor, it is the man who erected the fence around it that is the aggressor. Yet without that fence nobody has any incentive to do anything useful with it. I suppose this emerges from the fact that might makes right and anyone with the capability of taking land without consequence will do so. But we are here to determine what is right, not what is simply true. This one is a difficult problem indeed.

As far as intellectual property, I don't think you can own information. Nobody truly does, we create this abstract framework to try to make it so but it is fundamentally impossible to simultaneously own information and make it useful in the world and ultimately everyone knows this. To truly own information you have to keep it to yourself, but keeping it to yourself is mostly useless. A machine necessarily contains the information on its design in it's entirety, to put the machine into the world is to tell the world how to build it.




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