The nature of property

I remember reading a book in third grade by Natalie Babbit called Tuck Everlasting. In it were some pretty heavy treatments of philosophy for a children's book, but there is a question I still remember seven years on. When you are given a deed to own land, do you own it all the way to the core of the Earth, or do you only own the few inches of soil where most ants will never have the knowledge of your existence?

It is my opinion, that as technology progresses, we will only have more challenges at the conception of property. This is probably where my political stance shows, but here I argue not for its radical abolition or conscious redistribution. Rather, like many concepts we hold with sanctity, it requires redefinition as time progresses. A proper definition after all, is needed to achieve justice.

One only needs to look at file-sharing and the almost sheer impotency of the RIAA, World Trade Organisation and the other various authorities to put a stop to it. "Information wants to be free", goes the famous cry. But at the same time we must ensure that thinkers and artists are rewarded for their effort and their intellectual creation, or otherwise no one would bother to create such works.

In Disney's Pocahontas, our young heroine is horrified at the idea of owning land. How is it possible to own a demarcated plot, its trees, its fauna, and its life? Ownership is a very crude concept. From the age of infancy, we sought to clame our stake on things, then were told off when we didn't share them. Some of us were also horrified at giving our things to that other person, who might not know how to take care of them. Property is a convenient designation of control. But it is becoming increasingly inaccurate.

Similarly, as we tamper into genetic engineering, cloning, or human gestation, former sacred boundaries of life are being desecrated. What makes us homo sapiens sapiens after all - our genome? But is the baby with cri du chat and a maimed fifth chromosome any less human? What about the cancer sufferers with rampant occurrences of Philadelphia chromosomes, or even entire chromosomes deleted from many of their cells? What if I genetically enhance my baby to become stronger, faster and perhaps to have longevity? Would he or she be still human? Will the human race perhaps split somewhere down the evolutionary tree in a few hundred thousand years, if we survive that long?

But as our knowledge of science increases, we know our objects aren't static. In a complete vacuuum, virtual particles abound. Chemical interactions originating from material from our neighbours affect our property without our persmission. Runoff, air pollution, acid rain, the nuclear reactor experiment from the boy scout next door. Can you own air? But at the same time we're selling oxygen tanks. Can you own a genome? But we're already patenting genes.

In the future, we'll have technology that will be able to copy conceptual information in a manner far more advanced than we have now. Copying music is possible because we can translate an analog signal into digital PCM information representing sound waves. But soon, perhaps we'll get to a transhumanistic stage where computers are more closely integrated with our minds. When we hear a piece of music, just as we can play it inside our minds, we can also merge it with other thoughts to create a new, derived work. With technological aid, we could send those sounds playing inside our heads to our friends.

Copyright law would say that is a derived work of the original work of the creator. This would mean it would be illegal to transmit what you think to your friends. Somehow that is disturbing - you are forbidden to express your thoughts. This arises because when we receive information, our brain is actively processing it, reworking it, transmitting it. Artists can get sued for merely including a few notes from a musical theme into their own works, perhaps out of inspiration.

But when we create intellectual works, is it necessary that we own it? Must we forbid each other to all transmit our thoughts? Would it not be better at a certain point to lift all restrictions for fear that this might be counter-productive in itself? And yet we must make sure the original intellectual thinkers are rewarded. Then you have patenting of software. Just because you invented the scrollbar, does it mean you have the right to make everyone who puts it in their programs pay royalties to you?

How do you own land? How do you own property? Perhaps as science advances, we might find that there are more to our physical objects than we think, as well.