Everything owned

Somebody somewhere owns everything
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Once all was open
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Open to all
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Now nothing much is not owned or claimed by someone or some corporation.
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And this realm of the owned continues to expand.
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Corvette owns a certain shade of red.
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UPS a certain shade of brown.
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These are parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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Did these companies create these colors, or just enclose them, wall them off and call them theirs?
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Harley-Davidson has done the same thing to the sound of its revving motorcycle engine.
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To the extent that music, images, and text can be digitized, intellectual property comes down to owning numbers, a natural next step after the conversion of the world to numbers.
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Thus we have extended ownership to the fundamental stuff of reality: electromagnetic waves, numbers, DNA, sound waves.
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That these are considered "intellectual property" again bespeaks our hubris, that we presume dominion over something far prior to human beings.
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We have merely taken what was there already, the substrate of reality.
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Whether words or land, at the beginning of the chain of purchase and sale, someone must have simply appropriated it.
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As P.J. Proudhon proclaimed in 1840, "Property is theft."
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Our possession of this world we have made ours is a grand larceny.
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And its victim is the commonwealth: the land, the genome, mother culture.
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We could say that property is what has been stolen from us all, or from Nature, or from God.
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In any event, our progressive ownership of the world naturally and inevitably accompanies our progressive estrangement from the world. 
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So that in the end we languish in the prison of me and mine. 
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Which, no matter how great our possessions, is far narrower and dingier than the unbounded wild from whence we came.

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Charles Eisenstein