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Comment on The Copyright Monopoly Stands In Direct Opposition To Property Rightsparent

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I think that copyright rights are less fundamental than physical property rights. The right to own/control a physical, tangible item is very intuitive to me. The right to control how other people use or share a piece of information is fuzzier, a step further removed. That's just me, but I find it reasonable to suppose that many others have a similar view.

I was arguing from a legal viewpoint: neither copyrights nor other property rights are more fundamental in the law.

Re: intuition, it's strange that you'd characterize movies, music, and software as "information." While most people would find laws regulating the information they can share with other people to be unintuitive, people also don't perceive movies, music, and software to be "information." The reduction of these things to "information" in the sense of "strings of ones and zeroes" (no different than say a phone number or someone's birth date) is a distinctly techie abstraction. People perceive these things not as information, but as products, analogizing them to any other product they may buy. Indeed, I think that's where the intuitive appeal of the first sale doctrine comes from. People find the first sale doctrine intuitive not because they think there shouldn't be restrictions on the "information" they can share with other people, but because they see movies, songs, etc, as akin to physical property, which they can resell.

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