db: Your bulldozer example is silly and beneath you. Of course no libertarian, of any persuasion, is going to say that merely because you own an item that you then have the right to use that item in any manner that violates the rights of someone else.

I have little regard for those that say that an idea (let's say in the form of a book) is only owned in the manifestation of a specific entity (a hardcopy book, for example) and not the content of the specific sequence of words. I know that some would say that if you take your book and Xerox it for example, that the physically copied set of pages (for all intents and purposes a copy of the original book) is not owned by the owner of the original book, but by the owner of the paper onto which it was copied (and what about the toner that was transferred from the copier to the paper - but that's another story). That is a silly and frivolous argument, as the second "book" could not have existed had the first never existed. Similarly, if I would read the original manuscript into a sound recording device of your choosing, there are some libertarians that would say that this is clearly not the property of the originator, as it has changed form. But again, that is a silly argument as the sound recording would not have existed without the original words having been captured in some form in the first place. The original creator of the words would have a claim to all copies (a copy right), regardless of how they were subsequently manifested.

The concept that an idea has no substance until codified physically has some merit, but can also be quickly terminated. Long before humankind had codified language stories had been created and passed from generation to generation. There was no need for a physical manifestation, it was transferred from mind to mind via voice and hearing. Thus, clearly, ideas can exist without physical manifestation.

The next question is whether ideas can be "owned." Here, I think that we will have some conflict. Can an idea be created in the mind of more than one individual? I think that clearly we can accept that this is not only feasible, but that it actually happens all the time. Clearly the fact that many people end up at the local Subway for lunch indicates that many people can have the same idea contemporaneously. The next question is whether multiple people can come up with unique and novel ideas completely independently. Let us look at an example that I was just discussing with some relatives over Easter. Take the Rubik's cube. There are a finite number of "mixed up" configurations and an infinite number of ways to get to those states, but there is a single algorithm that will solve any mixed up configuration. Many people, independently, came up with that algorithm, most of them without even realizing that they had done so. Would it be logical to say that the first person to come up with the solution algorithm thus "owned" that algorithm? Did not the persons who independently came to the same solution method have just as valid a claim? Does timing matter?

We have a paradox, though, when it comes to merely codifying words (and more abstractly, if you want to go into representations of entities in 3D space). We have the infinite monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters (or I prefer an infinite number of computers generating random sequences of letters and spaces). Under such a scenario, all literary works ever created or that ever will be created could thus be generated (and if it truly were infinite, that would happen instantaneously). So, If I owned those resources (however they might manifest themselves), then wouldn't I thus own all written literature (excepting if we agree that anything already created was already owned)? Of course, this is impossible, but it presents a good thought exercise.