To the extent that intellectual property is much more easily transmittable in some senses  (say via the internet)  than physical property I agree, yes.  (That's the main point I'm taking it).


I guess I was just thinking that people: say a dudette is publishing books arguing for the abandonment of capitalism,  and people will question them "why don't you make your books freely available on-line if you're so big on freeing-up property rights?", and if I was her, the best answer I could give from what I've seen you say is that "because I think that everybody should give up their property rights first".  And people might think she's just trying to make a cheap buck then.

So I guess I'm wondering why you think it's more important to "give up" physical property rights first?  (if this is a standard argument, you can just cite me a reference   )

Don't underestimate my fruit jokes: they indicate not only a skepticism toward the idea that property rights can be dissolved overnight, but also a skepticism toward the idea that they can be fairly dissolved in any incremental fashion. I don't read the standard arguments, so I can't give you a reference, all I'm saying is that if we are entertaining the idea of an incremental dissolution of property, whatever it might look like, then intellectual property should certainly not come first. And if everything that isn't intellectual property is physical property, then it follows that phys prop must come first. You see how this is all hypothetical now, incrementpatio?

Ian, I wonder what your own opinions on this issue actually are, I mean as opposed to your opinions of what other people have said on this messageboard.

I don't really accept that there's such a thing as "art for art's sake". There is always more to it than that. To me a phrase like that smacks of avoiding the attempt to understand the presence of art in society in a deeper way, an avoidance which can be quite sincere and indeed understandable but which hardly prepares one to take part in a discussion like the present one (see the title thread!) except in terms of dismissing the whole thing as nonsense.

Popularity is not just a question of the music itself, as I'm sure you well know. Let's say I wanted to "see if I could do it". I could certainly make an attempt to create some music which would fit into the mould of what is currently selling well, or, to use your word, "popular". But then the real work would start, the business work so to speak, and for that I have neither the aptitude nor the interest. So I prefer to carry on doing the work which attempts to express as well as possible what is important to me to communicate in music.


No, I'm saying the exact opposite of that - note once more t_i_n's word "constituted" rather than "intended".

I'm quite surprised by that actually, although we are obviously all entitled to our own wish lists. I would have thought that, if anything, the rise of intellectual property rights (in both the arts and the sciences) over the last hundred years or so almost constitutes the prime text-book example of the process of 'commodification', turning things which weren't previously thought of as tradeable objects at all (or possibly not even as 'objects', let alone tradeable ones) into things which can be owned, bought and sold. In my personal daemonology, this recent turning of 'ideas' into marketable goods comes fairly high up the list of things to be undone. Last in, first out - apart from anything else - if the idea is to halt and reverse the 'commodification' process. Owning ideas, of all things, and enforcing exclusive trading in them seems to me anyway about as artificial and 'late' capitalist as its possible to get. Hanging on to that while doing away with physical property seems... a bit surprising.

But then I'm not in charge either so, as you say, it is all rather hypothetical.

Well, the rise of ideas as marketable goods comes with the ease of disseminating such goods. I certainly think that producers of old would have been treated more fairly if their works hadn't been pirated and reproduced without permission in the early days of the printing press.
Who is in charge?! I'd like a word or two with them.

Addendum: My comments are motivated by the fact that intellectual work is so highly individual and so life-affirming (as in making life worth living) -- physical work is only there to make intellectual work possible (insofar as these concepts are separable). Perhaps I am overly sentimental?

Given that this is largely the case here and now (even in the relatively "enlightened" parts of the world that you and I inhabit), clearly the commodification of intellectual property hasn't helped very much...

Well, we aren't contradicting each other. If there is a concept of property, there should be a concept of intellectual property, I say.