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>Words you put out into the world don't belong to you anymore

Literally everyone from the richest of commercial interests to the kumbaya-est of libre interests will disagree.



And in the context of natural rights, they'd be wrong.

Natural rights are fairly easily thumbnail-sketched by "What are your rights if you're on a desert island?" Out of the context of any preexisting society, what rights would you have?

On a desert island, if I find some words scrawled ten feet high on a cliffside, I may do with the ideas in those words what I will: copy them, change them 'round, claim they came from me, claim they came from god. Similarly if I hear some mountain hermit shouting them from their cave. The natural rights as apply to ideas are very, very liberal. We in modern societies (and only recently) have taken up the experiment of constraining those rights with temporarily and contextual monopolies to incentivize creation of more ideas via property law. This works, but in a clunky, hackish way; it is a strange kind of "theft" that leaves us with more of something than when we started.

And like all good wild hacks, it deserves to be considered for refactoring frequently.




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