You believe you do NOT proceed from ANY premise by asking a question about something? Interesting - and erroneous. Lets see if I can point out to you some of the premises you have already stated. First off, you present a concrete example:
“Downloading music you haven’t purchased.”
and you ask:
“What’s wrong with [that]” and “By what standard is it wrong?”
You then present a number of principles from which you proceed:
P(remise)1 “treating music files as merely 1s and 0s is context-dropping”
and
P2 “objectivity demands that I identify [music files] as what those bits comprise: songs created by someone’s effort, translated into an electronic medium.”
What does that make them? You do not explicitly state that. The answer is “intellectual property.”
You then say:
“In the one case, it is a CD that belongs to someone else that was purchased for a certain amount of money and would be sold at a profit. In other words, I’ve stolen a handful of CDs from Best Buy, not from Universal Records or Britney Spears. Downloading music and stealing CDs are not tantamount.”
This paragraph includes three premises:
P3 There is a distinction between physical property and intellectual property. (What is property? You do not identify that premise. What is the distinction between property that is physical and property that is intellectual? You do not identify that distinction. What is it about these physical and intellectual things which makes them property? You do not identify that premises. These are some of the things I asked you to make explicit.)
P4 Taking physical property is theft
P5 Taking intellectual property is not theft.
You then re-emphasize that you are NOT talking about physical property:
“Regardless, this [cd’s, burgers, etc] is still physical property.”
So far, then, your implicit premise is that physical and intellectual property are not the same and that some UNNAMED principle makes taking physical property theft, and is thus wrong. But somehow that the same principle does NOT apply to intellectual property, so taking it is not theft, and thus how can it be wrong (ie by what standard? Why?)
What is that unnamed principle? No one knows because so far you have yet to name it. That is ONE of the premises you must make explicit.
You continue:
P6 “Principles, as you should know, are not absolute; they are contextual.”
P7 “If I download a song from the internet, I am not living by the principle that there is no such thing as the right to life;”
P8 “I am not imposing claims on someone elses life.”
Here your principle is that intellectual property does not relate to one’s right to one’s life, and that taking intellectual property is not a claim upon someone else’s life. Again this raises questions about how it IS property at all then. These are more premises you need to state explicitly.
P9 “Whether or not I downloaded that song or not, that person still spent a fixed amount of time producing that CD.”
In other words, you somehow believe that time spent in producing intellectual property is what defines one’s claim to that property.
P10 “My action does not impose a positive claim on their life, time or property.”
With these statements you deny intellectual property is property at all, because you claim taking that intellectual property is not a claim TO their property at all, and thus not a claim on their time or their life.
P11 “my concept of stealing actually consists of taking SOMETHING.”
This means you limit the concept of theft to the material realm - ie apparently you do not think it is possible to steal someone else’s ideas - which further implies that you do not think intellectual property is property at all.
–
Now you finally respond to my posts. And you claim:
“I never presented a case against intellectual property.”
Unfortunately, your previous statements contradict this claim. And then you make this claim:
“All I asked was how downloading music (or copying intellectual property) was detrimental to my life.”
As you should now be able to see, you did FAR more than just ask that question. You made a number of assertions based on a number of premises. Additionally, these premises from which you proceed are based upon even more fundamental premises. In other words, these premises do not exist in a vacuum. They are derived from something - something you were asked to make explicit. Hopefully you can now do that.
Next, in response to Ash, you say:
“the validity of intellectual property isn’t my inquiry here.”
Apparently you are unaware of the fact that many of the above premises do indeed question the validity of intellectual property, as your quotes should make perfectly clear.
Finally, you sum up your position by saying:
P12 “I understand how a policy of physical property theft is greatly a hazard to my life, but not downloading music.”
Put simply, you claim to understand how theft of physical property is a great ‘hazard’ but fail to understand how theft of intellectual property is a hazard (or even theft at all). Of course you do not state (ie identify EXPLICITLY) *why* theft of physical property is a hazard. Nor, as has already been pointed out, do you explain why intellectual property cannot be stolen at all (thus begging the question how it could be considered property in the first place).
THESE are ALL questions which can be answered if you IDENTIFY explicitly your fundamental premises.
–
As you can see, your question was not free of premises. You have at LEAST 12 different premises in your posts upon which you base the question in the first place. Are you surprised?
WHY *I* had to identify YOUR premises for you is something you should really think about - ie why YOU couldn’t do it for yourself is something that should really concern you. Hopefully, now that your EXPLICIT premises have been pointed out to you, you should be able to both fill in the blanks you left AND name the more fundamental premises upon which these are based.
FURTHERMORE, you claim:
“I’ve read all the standard Objectivist literature, I don’t need an exposition on rights.”
“I’m well versed in Objectivist theory”
If these statements are true (and evidence to support the claim is sorely lacking at the moment), then you should be able to state the Objectivist position on intellectual property - what makes it valid, what is a copyright, how does it relates to intellectual property and why is theft of such property harmful to man, just as theft of physical property is harmful.
Of course, the first time you were asked to do this, you ignored the request entirely. The second time you were asked, you engaged in a mudslinging screed. And the third time you were asked, you claimed you had NO stated premises against which to compare the objectivist position (of course that should not have prevented you from stating that position - which, strangely enough, includes the answer to your question). Now that I have done the work of making YOUR *stated* premises clear to YOU, hopefully you will now be able to comply with the request which has been made of you numerous times. As I said, until you do - ie until you explicity identify your premises and explain HOW they contradict Objectivist premises with which you claim to be so “well versed” - no one can proceed logically with the topic YOU have presented.
Regardless, this is still physical property.
