At least in the Anglo-American world, the only world I know much of anything about, we've built our entire societies on the back of common law constructs around contracts, tort and property rights. For better or for worse, it's how we do things. The American revolution was just a logical extension to the legal structures that had been evolving in the United Kingdom for hundreds of years.
I can see the appeal of throwing out the concept of property rights if you, well, own no property, which was entirely the case for the vast majority of people living in Russian in 1917.
However, here in the United States, we've taken another approach, and that is to encourage ownership and participation in the legal and market structures that define our society. We want more homeowners, more intellectual property owners, and more equity owners.
The more people we have benefitting from these fantasies, the more likely that these fantasies continue.
I think for the intents of this discussion, we've already tried out the "communist" approach to digital media ownership on the Internet. We got to where we are right now because we've basically abandoned intellectual property. But we didn't get rid of ownership. There are plenty of profitable companies who deal in hosting, distributing and organizing digital media who don't track nor care about who owns anything.
Just like with the communist experiments on the grand scale of the Soviet Union, property ownership doesn't go away entirely, it just lays in the hands of a select few to the detriment of everyone else. It's not like you could ever stroll in to Stalin's house and borrow his hat without asking.
Now, if we could just get more private entities in the Western world to realize that all of their ownership stems from the fantasies of a social contract between a people and it's government, we might be able to get somewhere. Acting like the government is always the enemy is absurd. You can't have a corporation without government or some other system for managing the state of ownership... hmm, what's that technology that showed up recently related to coming to consensus on who owns what on a shared public ledger?
Thank you for exhaustive answer. It seems you mix personal, communal and private property. In the Soviet Union there was no private property. However, it respected personal property, so was the basis for criminal law, and you could not walk in and take Stalin's hat. And there was co-operative, or communal property, which was the property form for large enterprises. Property of the state falls into this category, however with a bit different sauce.
With respect to IP rights, the USSR considered that personal property and established legislation for that. Vast libraries of the USSR patents were protected that way.
As you pointed out - that was grandiose experiment. And it failed. Because what people wanted is private property and the state that protects private property. But the nature of the Internet reveals basic truth - you cannot own music.
Absurd things like arrested Tokyo accordionist who played The Beatles for fun will happen all the time if one impose private property on music. But you can control distribution and charge for that, owning supply chain of music - this is what Apple and Amazon do.
They are not going to sue homeless singing "Yellow Submarine" on the outskirts of Chicago. But they will extort every penny from labels and indie musicians who wants to use their trade channels to reach customers.
I can see the appeal of throwing out the concept of property rights if you, well, own no property, which was entirely the case for the vast majority of people living in Russian in 1917.
However, here in the United States, we've taken another approach, and that is to encourage ownership and participation in the legal and market structures that define our society. We want more homeowners, more intellectual property owners, and more equity owners.
The more people we have benefitting from these fantasies, the more likely that these fantasies continue.
I think for the intents of this discussion, we've already tried out the "communist" approach to digital media ownership on the Internet. We got to where we are right now because we've basically abandoned intellectual property. But we didn't get rid of ownership. There are plenty of profitable companies who deal in hosting, distributing and organizing digital media who don't track nor care about who owns anything.
Just like with the communist experiments on the grand scale of the Soviet Union, property ownership doesn't go away entirely, it just lays in the hands of a select few to the detriment of everyone else. It's not like you could ever stroll in to Stalin's house and borrow his hat without asking.
Now, if we could just get more private entities in the Western world to realize that all of their ownership stems from the fantasies of a social contract between a people and it's government, we might be able to get somewhere. Acting like the government is always the enemy is absurd. You can't have a corporation without government or some other system for managing the state of ownership... hmm, what's that technology that showed up recently related to coming to consensus on who owns what on a shared public ledger?