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Reasoning about it from the perspective of something physical, one could argue that intellectual property doesn't exist at all, and we should only consider the books, movie media etc. to be property.

If we were to take the contents of a book or a movie for example, and copy it, you still have the physical source, and nothing is lost, your property is still yours. It's just that there is more of it due to the additional copy. That copy isn't yours, and from the moment it was created it still isn't yours. So in that line of thinking, the property that was created is not the same as the property it was copied from, which means two different properties exist.

We can make this even trickier, because if we were to reason about the physical property and the intellectual property separately, the story in a book, and the physical book itself would be two different properties. So when you create a copy, that book that started out blank was definitely not part of the property of someone else. So does the act of adding intellectual property now suddenly transfer the physical property to the source of the intellectual property?

In the current laws and practises around the world we have made all sorts of rules about this, but just reasoning about it before falling back on established practice already shows that it doesn't always turn out to be as easy as it seems.



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