Right, but it does complement the "common" understanding of use-values. Reasserting usufruct as a legal concept would help fulfill one of Doug's proviso's on democratic procedures for land use being a potential pathway to any feasible future socialism. It would also strengthen the state on all sorts of environmental laws regulating industrial property; firms lease ecological services from the larger society under democratically specified conditions. Violation of those conditions leads to loss of license, punitive damages to cover cleanup costs etc. It also helps us to recover a sense of how to think intergenerationally and begin to think anew about the phenomena of missing markets.
>Hmmm. I admit I'm not 100% sure whether things like the thought that FNMA
should count for use-values or not. But it doesn't necessarily matter very
much, since it is clear that for value to appear in association with such
an intellectual use-value, the intellectual use-value must first undergo a
change in form. It must be replaced by something consumable, such as a book
in which the thought is printed or a legally limited right of access to the
thought. (Both of these processes also add dead labor to the thought.)
Otherwise it will fail to exchange and won't be able to have value. I would
interpret intellectual property rights as an effort to legislate just such
a transformation.
Embodying the use-values of ideas does not change their form[s], nor does it render them scarce [they can't be consumed]. It is the legal structure of property rights whereby the state gives some the right to exclude others from their use that [partially]creates the kind of exchange values they may have as commodities and how they may further contribute to the development of other use-values. What is the other value that appears in association with the intellectual use-value? Or, hopefully better, does the value of ideas precede [temporally and ontically] their use-value? Do we want to avoid instrumentalism in our social epistemology?
ian