Mises IP Article

[Charles M.]

http://mises.org/daily/3863

I find this whole push against IP rights to be quite puzzling.  What possible benefit can come from making it legal to rip off and sell other peoples' work?  The benefits of copyright seem so obvious and the downsides basically non-existent.  Patents are a little tougher because there is inefficiency when ideas are too obvious, or two people are both working an idea and one beats the other by a short time, etc.   But these are implementation difficulties, and I still wonder why you would go out of your way to make a case for ripping off other peoples' inventions.  How could medical innovation survive without IP rights?  I find his statement that IP law is on balance a negative very hard to believe.

The part where he bases his argument on homesteading is pretty rough too.  Maybe someone has rigorously defined this idea, but if so I've never seen it.  What exactly constitutes "mixing my labor" with something?  How much land could a person homestead?  And it's all kind of a dead end anyway, trying to tie legitimate ownership to a demonstration of a full chain of "legitimate" transfers starting from homestead to the present day.  Nobody can do that with anything they own.  Are they really suggesting we try to unravel these chains of ownership and right all historical wrongs?

There's also this notion that the rights he accepts, unlike IP rights, are somehow non-arbitrary.  Maybe assault and outright theft are somewhat obvious (but I bet you could cloud those up with a little thought), but how about invading your rights with respect to noise, verbal assault, bright light, smell, pollution, etc?  How about probabilistic rights violations - putting you or your property at risk but not actually doing anything (right then)?  All of these require legal interpretations or are arbitrary.  The best we can do is work toward the utility maximizing set of rights.  Why would IP be any different?

[Paul Birch]

As I'm sure you recall from ASC, Kinsella's always been anti-IP, and prone to formulating long, convoluted and wildly fallacious arguments. IIRC he was one of the few who couldn't see why Hoppe's self-ownership argument was rubbish. He also shares a common libertarian prejudice against treating anything but physical force as a rights violation, and against treating anything but physical objects as property.

Property rights are regions in behaviour space such that crossing their boundaries without permission of the rights holders is a wrong, subject in justice to compensation for breach.

They're not limited to physically scarce resources, nor to "exclusive control". We can put the boundaries anywhere we find convenient (so long as we do any rebundling justly).

There is of course a difficulty with IP - which is that information can be copied indefinitely, or exist in many instances, without taking that information away from its originator. Something that's not true of a physical good, which is scarce in a sense that copied information is not. We do need (in a just regime) to take due account of independent invention. We also need to realise that when copyright material is distributed some rights are inevitably transferred to the purchasers; for example, the right to transfer a copy into your brain! Rights will gradually seep into the "public domain"; the limited period of copyright protection is a crude approximation to this.

The economic importance of information is so great that it is hard to see how any developed society could function without at least some property rights in it. Contracts are themselves philosophically a subset of copyright information. Think of the chaos if you could just copy and rewrite them at will. Money, in any form other than pure commodity money (actual gold coins, not gold certificates or gold on account), is another example.

The general principle for new goods is that you own what you create with what you own.  That doesn't mean you can't contract it away in advance.  When you homestead a thing, you create the boundaries that turn it into property. The statue affair is an old saw from the Institutes of Justinian; the simple answer is that you own the statue you create; you also owe the original owner for the stone you've appropriated and for any loss he has incurred through your actions in breach of his rights.