Maksim Barbukhin
Alex Murin answers
Usually, people agree among themselves on what constitutes private property. Under communism, people agree that there will be no private property. Under various versions of democracy, private property can be a thing, movable and immovable assets, and everything you buy from the state, to which by default all ownerless or public property belongs. Libertarianism assumes either a total rejection of the state or a reduction of its role to a minimum. Consequently, private property can be anything people have agreed upon within a separate contractual jurisdiction. It is generally implied that a person cannot be property, as acquiring a person as property is most often associated with a violation of a basic principle—the prohibition of aggressive violence. Although some anarcho-capitalists view a child as the property of their parents until full emancipation.
Regarding copyright, most libertarians oppose the very concept of intellectual property. This is how things happened historically. This concept first appeared in Great Britain in the early 18th century, and this right protected only the interests of publishers. Over time, legislation in this area changed. Various concepts were devised as to why this is beneficial for authors. In fact, such a right remained as a protection of publishers’ interests as it always was. You lose nothing if someone happens to download your photo. When information is copied, it does not disappear from the person who copied it.
But libertarians also adhere to the principle of freedom of contract. No one will stop you from selling photos, books, including e-books, or music. Similarly, no one has the right to stop you from creating a community, jurisdiction, or municipality where you locally agree to recognize copyright and intellectual property and fulfill the contract among yourselves.
Default copyright protection most often leads to the emergence of artificial monopolies. This has happened more than once when authors were forced to collaborate only with a specific publishing house that paid just enough for the author to barely survive. Or various inventions simply did not become serial products simply because it was not profitable for certain monopolists in the market.
Addition from Ancap-chan
Of course, you can demand compensation from someone who downloaded and used your photograph. To do this, you need to find the person who did it and sue them. In court, you will have to prove that the defendant actually downloaded and used your specific photograph, and also justify why the compensation you are demanding is of that specific amount. The judge, in turn, will investigate under what license the photograph was distributed, what benefit its use brought, and whether you truly did not transfer the photo to the defendant with the right of arbitrary use. It is not certain that the amount of compensation you eventually receive will cover the costs you will face in this case, but what wouldn’t one do for the sake of principle!
However, the vast majority of people, finding themselves in a situation where there is no state to protect their right to control the copying of information, will simply ignore such a difficult-to-implement right and will seek self-actualization in other ways.
