http://www.noss123.com/ The two major justifications given for original property, or homesteading, are *effort* and *scarcity*. John Locke emphasized effort, "mixing your labor" with an object, or clearing and cultivating virgin land. Benjamin Tucker preferred to look at the telos of property, i.e. What is the purpose of property? His answer: to solve the scarcity problem. Only when items are relatively scarce with respect to people's desires do they become property. [5] For example, hunter-gatherers did not consider land to be property, since there was no shortage of land. Agrarian societies later made arable land property, as it was scarce. For something to be economically scarce, it must necessarily have the *exclusivity property* - that use by one person excludes others from using it. These two justifications lead to different conclusions on what can be property. Intellectual property - non-corporeal things like ideas, plans, orderings and arrangements (musical compositions, novels, computer programs) - are generally considered valid property to those who support an effort justification, but invalid to those who support a scarcity justification (since they don't have the exclusivity property.) Thus even ardent propertarians may disagree about IP.[6] By either standard, one's body is one's property. >From some anarchist points of view, the validity of property depends on whether the "property right" requires enforcement by the state. Different forms of "property" require different amounts of enforcement: intellectual property requires a great deal of state intervention to enforce, ownership of distant physical property requires quite a lot, ownership of carried objects requires very little, while ownership of one's own body requires absolutely no state intervention. There are no profit making benefits of any kind associated with this activity. No benefit or return of any nature is expressed or implied and no promises or guarantees of any such return are permitted to be made by any participant of this activity. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://bioinformatics.org/pipermail/lugend-soji/attachments/20070822/ed4e7a44/attachment.html