In What Are Words Worth?, the author writes:

I was listening to a podcast talk from Mises University 2009 the other night called "Intellectual Property and Libertarianism", in which speaker Stephan Kinsella made the usual Slashdotty-type case against IP from a libertarian perspective. This was novel for me, perhaps because libertarians tend to be very defensive of property rights, such as Ayn Rand's assertion of IP as a right to the products of a person's own mind.

Kinsella rejects Rand explicitly, saying her case offers little more than deification of the creator. His counter-argument is interesting: IP is inconsistent with property rights because it violates the rights of others to use their property. To wit, if I own a typewriter and a stack of paper, or a CD burner and some blank discs, then those should be mine to do with as I see fit. But because of copyright, I can't use the typewriter to transcribe a book, or to use the burner to copy a CD, even if I've bought original copies of the hypothetical book and CD. IP asserts a partial ownership enough to say "you can't do that" over this other property I own. That, according to Kinsella's argument, is inconsistent and therefore invalid.

Interesting, and tricky, and I don't quite know what to make of it.

It's important because, of course, my income is highly dependent on the idea of IP. If I couldn't charge for copies of iPhone SDK Development, I probably wouldn't have spent hundreds (possibly thousands?) of hours over the last year and a half co-writing it. If I couldn't charge for apps on the App Store, would I write them?

The counter-argument comes from the open-source crowd, who say to give away your content (which, by the earlier argument, you couldn't own anyways), and make your money some other way.

The author here is admirably open-minded. I think he is a bit confused when he says the "counter-argument" is to give away your content, but he also inadvertently hits on an important insight. It's not a "counterargument" of ours to say you "should" just give away content. This is rather a prediction that some business models may employ this approach. But note the author says: "If I couldn't charge for copies of iPhone SDK Development,..." Well, of course you can charge for copies. It's just that it might be hard to prevent others from offering it for free or for a lower price, if you don't find some means of exclusion. In other words, part of the entrepreneur's job is to find efficient means of exclusion. Drive-in movie theater owners employ ticket counters, pay for locks on the doors, and for the installation of hundreds of parking-lot per-car speakers to exclude free-riders. Every business has costs of exclusion. If, in the end, the entrepreneur finds that he cannot make a profit in a given endeavor, taking all costs--including costs of exclusion--into account, then that project would require an inefficient allocation of capital. Simple.

[Cross-posted at SK]

Wow, two flat-headed pragmatic amoral infantile justifications for theft in one! The first says 'the creator of the property has no right because the fact that many steal from him that this proves ipso facto that he should -- ought -- must -- give away that which the needy need to steal and use more of his ingenuity to 'figure out another way' to make money. What's to stop the next whiner down the road from justifying stealth under that new idea? What is this, a chain letter?

Mr. Kinsella chides the writer of this idiocy, 'admiring' him but suggesting innocent confusion and an accidental insight, then attempts to one-up him with something quite a bit more odious, which includes a fait accompli of theft magically having already occurred to wit: the sin of the property owner is that he has failed -- failed -- to "find some means of exclusion." A nice turn of the phrase. I guess the creator's private police force did not have enough bazookas to obliterate the other 'offerers' brains and shipping docks.

This amounts to: "There is no such thing as property. If you are not prepared to muscle-up and personally murder all the thieves who wish to sell what you created, I guess you just didn't have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Simple."

Typical libertarian flat-headedness.

By the way, the writer of that first bit WAS confused; he conflated libertarianism and Ayn Rand instead of reading and understanding her. Fatal error.

It's interesting how people are confusing the claim that state-enforced monopoly is immoral with the claim that the charging for the product is immoral. Why is that? Is the monopoly-based industry brainwashing THAT effective?