and 3

one way parts of history are sometimes narrated is as an expansion of the categories of things that can be owned. maybe nomadic tribes don't think you can own land. maybe we developed ownership for what's under the ground or bits of the atmosphere or expanded ownership or sovereignty over the waters etc. pretty soon we'll be staking claims to interstellar space, or to pieces of the past and the future or something. now, it is not clear that the expansion of what can be owned is an unalloyed good. the idea of ownerhip in abstract objects such as ideas, words, musical tones and so on might seem obvious or inevitable. but what if the situation started to reverse and we started to delete items from the list of things that can be owned?