Ownership
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive possession or control of some thing, which may be an object or some kind of property.
Some consider the term to be closely associated with the idea of private or public wealth. It is also claimed by some (principally among the political left), that the exclusivity of ownership underlies much social injustice, and facilitates tyranny and oppression on an individual and societal scale.
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Societies Without Ownership
Some societies, notably some Native American ones, appeared to exist without the concept of personal ownership. Members of a society would feel free to take any objects they had need of, and expect them to be taken by others. When these societies were encountered by European settlers they behaved in their usual way, which led to the Europeans regarding the natives as thieves.
This can be seen as a complex irony, since the notion of "thief" is a European, property-related term, and of course European settlers were taking the land of the native Americans without discussion or consultation: the question naturally arises here of "Who was the real thief?"
Thus, when the native Americans sold Manhattan to European settlers for an insignificant sum, the natives assumed everyone would continue to be allowed to use the land. They couldn't conceive of a European immigrant evicting a native. So the natives thought they were actually getting a good deal.
Ownership and Economics
Ownership is self-propagating: If an object is owned by someone, any additional goods produced by using that object will also be owned by the same person. Thus, the more a person can own or acquire through money, the more he or she will generate other things to be owned by him or her. Ownership is central to and facilitates the development of social systems such as capitalism.
However, it remains a matter of dispute whether the effects of ownership - and our present capitalist system in general - are mostly positive or mostly negative. See the articles on capitalism and sustainable development for more on this.
Intellectual ownership
Ownership of ideas or plans or strictly sensory works is always a complicated issue. Use of patents and copyright laws in modern society has introduced ownership for non-material things usually on a temporary basis. This is a mixed blessing, providing reward to innovators, but also greatly restricting the free flow of ideas and information (a fact which, according to some critics, will hurt innovation in the long run). Contributors to open source projects agree to share ownership of their contribution through licensing, therefore allowing possibly thousands of other people to contribute to its improvement. See intellectual rights for a fuller discussion.
Corporate ownership
In business, corporate ownership is critical as it determines who controls the factors of production owned by that corporation and thus who owns the outputs:
Companies or organisations usually own factories, or more generally, the capital, and the materials used to produce. They hire employees but they don't own employees - they do however control what is sometimes called human capital or have some exclusive right to individual capital (creativity, talent).
Companies which issue stocks are officially owned by stockholders, CEOs are hired by them to run companies. CEOs themselves do not own the companies, even though they may have more control and involvement than the 'real' owners, the stockholders. Executives of small companies are often also stockholders.
Whether they make major decisions like mergers, or whether they hold actual stock, line management makes daily decisions, and may not be directly answerable to the "real" owners - sometimes leading to cases of management usurpation of the powers normally attributed to owners. According to John Kenneth Galbraith and quite a few other economists back to Adam Smith, this obviates and reduces many of the benefits of tolerating a system of ownership in any society.
Land ownership
Land ownership presents special problems. Exclusive control of natural capital, right-of-way or migration routes of food animals, challenges most concepts of resource and rights sharing. It is often the divergence of views on ownership of land that creates what is called "class struggle" or what is called "colonialism", both of which refer to a power structure formed by a land ethic backed by some kind of brute force.
In classical economics there is an ambiguous position taken with regard to land ownership. Many theorists seemed to consider it a necessary evil, and argued that it could not be defended if there was not some obligation to keep and improve the land. Marxist economics was founded on, and continues to argue for, land reform as a means of social justice. Also, both Marxist and anarchist theories of ownership agree on the idea that private ownership of land is illegitimate, since the land was not created by any human beings, and most property over land was originally established through the use of brute force. In the 20th century, the idea of ecological stewardship led to legal ways that land ownership could be rightfully restricted because of erosion, pollution, biodiversity and other concerns - which reduced the level of what came to be called nature's services to all in the locality. In addition, property tax increasingly was levied to pay for services offered by the state, which could not be refused (such as fire fighting).
Geolibertarians do not believe that land can be owned by individuals.
Collective ownership
Emergency response, biotechnology, nanotechnology and terrorism presents serious challenges to the idea of exclusive control over resources or knowledge that may be required in some short period of time to avert some disaster, especially a synchronous failure which may be caused simply by timing problems.
As such threats increase in depth and nature, it seems likely that (at least) ownership of natural capital and instructional capital will be increasingly held by communal, and not by private, bodies. For instance biopiracy of native plant varieties used in sustainable agriculture are increasingly recognized as "belonging to" cultures or even ecosystems from which they originated.
Communalizing of intellectual rights and instructions is further evidenced by
- the 2003 agreements to let developing nations access drugs to treat HIV, malaria and other conditions, for drastically lower prices than would apply if they were to pay full patent royalties
- the patent pool by which China and MIT retain rights in instructions for the benefit of the institutions, not individuals, who produced them.
Information ownership
Infosocialists believe that individuals cannot "own" intellectual property.
