Nezumi

If you want to promote an argument for an RBE, just put it forward. That whole wall of text you posted is completely unnecessary. You're correct that logic is only as good as the inputs, so logic isn't a sufficient condition for a good argument; however, logic IS a necessary condition.

The need for the concept of "property" comes from the fact that things are scarce. Since things are scarce, if I work to produce or obtain something and you take it, then I have suffered the loss of my invested work. On the other hand, intellectual property (IP) tries to apply the characteristics of property to ideas and information (for brevity, I will henceforth only say "information"), which are not scarce. If I produce some information through my work and then you copy that information, then I still have my information. You have not caused you any suffering through the copying of my information. The objection I expect to this is that taking information may result in the loss of some future gain and thus cause harm to its producer. For instance, suppose I make an album and sell it on iTunes. If you pirate my song, I may claim that you have deprived me of a sale and therefore that I have suffered because of your actions. This would seem to contradict the claim that copying information doesn't cause harm. However, I object to this notion. My reasoning is this. When you produce something, generally you know what its characteristics are. It is based on those characteristics that you decide what to produce. For instance, an apple farmer produces apples knowing that its characteristics are deliciousness and nutritiousness. But suppose the farmer imagined that his apples also had the characteristic of giving the power of flight to its eater for 10 minutes. This would cause him to believe that the value of his apples was much greater than otherwise. Suppose he goes to the market and offers the apples for $100 each, and he gets some buyers. However, after a while people realize that the apples don't grant temporary powers of flight, and everyone stops buying them at $100. The farmer is left with no choice but to reduce the price to say, $1. He may feel that every sale is a loss of $99, but that notion is based in the fiction that his apples grant flight. He is actually not "losing" anything, as he would realize if he realized that his apples are normal apples. Now consider information. Is anyone harmed when one pirates a song? Of course, proponents of IP believe that they are, since they believe that potential sales are lost. But what if there were no potential sales? The only reason that there are future sales is that people believe in IP (or at least they obey the law, which believes in IP) and therefore pay money for the songs. So you can see there is a cyclical process going on here. Pirating harms the artist if there is IP, but IP only exists if pirating harms the artist. Being that its a cycle, suppose that no one paid for information. Then would it harm anyone to copy their information? No, because the original owner still has their copy, and no one is going to pay to obtain a copy in the future. You can see the ridiculousness of the farmer believing that the sale of an apple at $1 is a loss of $99, I'm sure. Suppose the farmer was still listing the apples at $100 and no one is buying. Then someone comes up and steals an apple. The farmer would believe that the theft cost him $100. However, everyone else puts the size of the loss at $1. The extra $99 that the farmer believes he lost are based in fiction. Likewise, many people today realize that the entire price of copying information is $0 and therefore when they copy it, they are not harming the originator, and therefore the information should not be considered property. The artists believe that piracy is costing them money... but that notion is based on the fact that people are treating information as if it had a trait that is does not, namely scarcity. Suppose the government mandated that this flight power be treated as real and insisted that the price of apples is $100. Some people would probably start paying that, simply because they don't want to live without apples. But does the fact that people are willing to pay that much in this scenario mean that they believe the apples actually have that value? No, it just means that $100 is the closest available price to the real price at which they can get apples.