You have to examine what it means to deprive one of property though; certainly, depriving one of their property's commercial value is a deprivation. Certainly if I seize your house and rent it back to you, such that you're paying the same for rent as you would for your mortgage, but you lose any equity in your house or the ability to sell it to someone else or pass it on to your children, I've meaningfully deprived you of property. Likewise, if you write a book, the value of that book to you is at least partially commercial, not merely in your ability to possess a copy of it.
If you wrote the book in order to obtain an exogenous financial return, then your creation of the book was a capital investment. Capital investments are speculative by nature, and inherently entail risk, which is the investor's to bear.
Using statute law to impose restrictions and obligations on others in order to protect some imagined entitlement to a positive return amounts to externalizing your risk and forcing others to bear it for you.
You're completely entitled to enjoy the fruits of your labor after applying your energies to create the book, those fruits being the book itself and the utility that owning it provides to you, which you literally cannot be deprived of due to the non-rival intangible nature of the product (considering that 'book' refers to the conceptual content rather than its physical encoding).
The financial return that you obtain by selling your book to others, however, is entirely dependent on their willingness to pay you, which they have no obligation to do in any case, and for which it can't be said that you have any inherent right.
> Using statute law to impose restrictions and obligations on others in order to protect some imagined entitlement to a positive return amounts to externalizing your risk and forcing others to bear it for you.
Copyright is no such thing; most copyrighted works don't have a positive financial return. The only "entitlement" being asserted is literally the right to copy: if I create a book, which is the fruit of my intellectual labor, I then have the right to exchange or extend or license the right to copy that book on whatever commercial, ideological, or personal terms are mutually agreeable to others, and to copy my book without such an agreement is to violate that right.
Again, I'm not saying this is my argument or my personal opinion about copyright. My approach to these issues is more pragmatic and realpolitik and less natural law. I am saying that there is a credible natural law argument to copyright.
Your argument--that an author still has the right to possess and enjoy the book that he has written--is insufficient as a response, since nearly all property rights extend beyond mere possession and enjoyment. That was the point of the house example. If I make a capital investment in building a house in hopes of selling it, and the state seizes my title without compensation but offers to let me live in the house rent-free in perpetuity, John Locke and most proponents of the natural law theory would be very displeased about the situation. On the other hand, if I make a capital investment in building a house in hopes of selling it and I end up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because it is the year 2010 and the housing bubble burst in the middle of construction, John Locke and most proponents of the natural law theory can only shake their heads and tell me I'm screwed.
> The only "entitlement" being asserted is literally the right to copy: if I create a book, which is the fruit of my intellectual labor, I then have the right to exchange or extend or license the right to copy that book on whatever commercial, ideological, or personal terms are mutually agreeable to others, and to copy my book without such an agreement is to violate that right.
And how does the right to control the downstream copying of the work emanate from the right to enjoy the fruits of your own labor?
The point I'm making is that the direct product of your work is the book itself and nothing more; the right to enjoy that product literally cannot be taken away from you. Other people's copying activities do nothing to diminish your ability to enjoy the direct utility value of the book itself - copying can only diminish the potential return available to you from selling your book to others, but you never had a positive right to a market return in the first place.
The argument you're making requires that there's already some legal mechanism by which you can restrain others from copying your work. Your reasoning is circular.
> And how does the right to control the downstream copying of the work emanate from the right to enjoy the fruits of your own labor?
Because the fruits of my (intellectual) labor are the (intellectual) property of the book itself--the unique arrangement of words and images and so forth. Since I created that arrangement, since that arrangement is the fruit of my labor, by natural law I have property rights to it.
Keep in mind, I'm only arguing that such an argument could credibly be made. I'm not committing to the idea that it works out in the long run--part of the problem with the natural law approach is that you get caught in all kinds of logical ruts without any concern for what works, and frankly there's a lot about copyright that doesn't work.
> The point I'm making is that the direct product of your work is the book itself and nothing more; the right to enjoy that product literally cannot be taken away from you.
Property rights extend beyond private enjoyment. Asked and answered.
> Other people's copying activities do nothing to diminish your ability to enjoy the direct utility value of the book itself - copying can only diminish the potential return available to you from selling your book to others, but you never had a positive right to a market return in the first place.
I never said there was a "positive right to a market return"; that was the entire point of the house example. Asked and answered.
> The argument you're making requires that there's already some legal mechanism by which you can restrain others from copying your work.
All property rights require some legal mechanism to be enforceable. Without deeds and titles I couldn't even own my house. Asked and answered. You're just repeating yourself without understanding any of my points.
> Because the fruits of my (intellectual) labor are the (intellectual) property of the book itself--the unique arrangement of words and images and so forth. Since I created that arrangement, since that arrangement is the fruit of my labor, by natural law I have property rights to it.
And since it's quite literally impossible for you to be deprived of that particular arrangement of words, images, etc., it's physically impossible for your right to be violated.
But you're not claiming just that limited property right; you're saying that you ought to be entitled to restrict others from independently creating their own replica of that arrangement of words, images, etc. which goes far beyond the scope of property rights.
> Property rights extend beyond private enjoyment. Asked and answered.
Into what other areas, then? I'm construing 'private enjoyment' here as the ability to direct the disposition of the associated property without restraint; but how does this extend to directing the disposition of other people's replicas of your property? How does it apply to inherently intangible and non-rival goods?
> I never said there was a "positive right to a market return"; that was the entire point of the house example.
The house example was a non-sequitur. In your example, the state seized your house from you and rented it back to you; they took something that was physically owned by you, and imposed their own constraints on its use and disposition. This is a clear violation of your rights. Again, I'm not seeing how it at all compares to other people independently creating a replica of something you own without imposing any constraints on you.
The only effect third-party copying can have on you is the alteration of external market conditions, potentially reducing the financial return you can obtain from selling copies of the work yourself; but again, you never had any right to guaranteed financial returns, so no right of yours is actually being violated here.
> All property rights require some legal mechanism to be enforceable.
Absolutely false. Physical property is inherently tangible and rival, meaning that only a finite number of individuals can control its disposition at any one time; it's therefore impossible for physical property to exist without someone establishing decisive control over it (or it being abandoned, in which case you might say it's not 'property' at all).
Now, people may seek to embody the process by which people establish decisive control over physical property in some sort of deliberative or judicial context, in order to reduce the possibility of disruption of their social groups arising from property disputes, but it would be inaccurate to suggest that without such a system, the concept of property would simply not exist.
> Without deeds and titles I couldn't even own my house.
No. Deeds and titles are post-hoc formalizations that recognize property rights; they aren't the primordial source of property rights.
Simply put, natural law doesn't presuppose that only physical objects can be property. That's a separate premise you're trying to sneak in. The act of writing a book creates an information/intellectual good, not just a physical artifact.
Look, I'm tired of repeating myself, and you're either not understanding my argument or too tendentious to even try. I don't even believe in natural law, and I think it's possible to use natural law to argue either side of the copyright dispute. If you want to obsessively argue that the natural law justification for copyright is wrong from a natural law standpoint, I honestly don't give a damn. My point is that such an argument can be made, and the fact that we are repeating ourselves to each other only proves my point.
If you want to discuss this further, my email address is in my profile.
Of course there's limited commercial value in holding intellectual property without legal protection, because there's limited commercial value in holding any type of property without legal protection. But that's completely beside the point of the natural law argument.
For what it's worth, I don't actually agree with this argument; I was just pointing out that it's possible to use natural law to argue in favor of intellectual property rights.
