It's easy to find "inventors" who are enthusiastic about patents. It's not so easy to find actual innovators. This article - which is about innovation, not intellectual property - might give an idea why that is. This team has built a prototype product. It might go to market, it might not - but here is the thing: nobody is going to bring it to market without paying them. They can show it off, everyone can see how it works, but until and unless they get paid what they want, nobody can make it. The devil is in all the details. Even if they go to production, it is not the case the a rival is going to be able to jump right in with an identical product. Intellectual property just isn't part of the picture here.

Intellectual property just isn't part of the picture here.

I am staggered that you would even make a statement like that. Intellectual property exists whether it is formalized or not. The only question is whether it is dedicated to the public or not. This device is a virtual poster child for intellectual property. At a minimum, it is currently a trade secret. Just because you see it, could you make another like it?

You're right, David, IP is not part of the picture, and they have interested outside investors. What with a big first mover advantage, assuming they execute their plan well, and perhaps sell some high margin services, this could be a huge winner. It could do well all around the world. As you and others have noted before, IP doesn't exist without a grant of monopoly privilege by the State. There is in fact no such thing as intellectual property; IP is really just a term to paper over patent, copyright, trademark, and trade dress monopolies with a more palatable and respectable label.

You've probably seen articles in the business press recently about how innovation often flourishes during recessions and depressions. The 1930s were the most innovative decade of the 20th century. Maybe the next decade will see a similar growth of innovation featuring products such as this one, a potential silver lining amidst the chilling headlines of the daily news. We can only hope.

Bill, as other others have also noted before, IP does exist without a monopolistic privilege. The inventor has a natural exclusive right to their designs (as recognised by the US constitution), and this is effectively a natural monopoly.

I'm very happy to agree with you that patent and copyright should be abolished (with considerable reform to trademark), but you cannot abolish natural rights, and governments have a duty to protect them.

As to the article, if there remain any designs or details known only to the team, then the team has an exclusive right to them, and these constitute the team's natural intellectual property (able to be sold to others). If the team publishes those designs or details, they are then 'exclusive to the public', i.e. no longer exclusive.

NB There can be no spooky action at a distance, thus one inventor cannot claim a natural ability to prevent any other inventor exploiting their independently created inventions that happen to be indistinguishably similar. Such a ludicrous concept is spawned by patent law, not nature.

Crosbie,

No one has a natural exclusive right to his design. You cite the "recognition" of the Constitution, but as Lysander Spooner pointed out, the Constitution had no legal or moral authority to bind anyone when it was written, and still less to bind future generations.

IP always depended on a monopoly grant of privilege from the State; books, inventions, and innnovations predated the first recognition, or should I say grant, of "intellectual property" by the State, which was rightly labeled by Murray Rothbard as a criminal gang, in fact "the biggest mass murderer, armed robber, enslaver, and parasite in all of human history."

No state criminal gang, no patents, copyrights, etc. Where is John Lennon when we need him?

Bill:

Intellectual property is any creation of the mind. Period. Patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights, and trade dress are types of intellectual property rights. As Crosbie correctly pointed out, intellectual property exists regardless of whether governmental protection has been provided.

As to this comment:

No one has a natural exclusive right to his design.

I have a natural exclusive right to anything I create that I keep to myself.

The distinction I would like to make is the distinction between the right to do what you want with your ideas, and the right to control copies of your ideas that are held by others. The word intellectual property is confusing in this context. The key point is that this innovation is taking place without any effort to impose controls over what other people may do with the ideas that are involved - that is this group is competing by trying to build a good product and get an edge over the competition, not by trying to exclude rivals and imitators. Most real innovators try to out compete their rivals, not suppress them.

David:

Your comment is generally true in the industrial world. Most competitors try to create better products than their rivals, and suppression is unusual. However, most companies will rarely tolerate identical copies of their patented inventions, particular if there are multiple inventions in one design and they are copied so exactly that it is difficult to tell the source of the product.

Bill, the US constitution is supposed to bind the government, not the people. It is supposed to recognise those natural rights of the people - that a government is then created and empowered by the people to protect. An individual's natural rights exist whether or not the constitution recognises them. The constitution did well in its recognition.

Unfortunately, it did poorly in explicitly limiting the government's power to derogate these rights, given it still went ahead and created inegalitarian privileges such as copyright and patent - monopolies that the founding fathers should have been more vociferous in deprecating (given they recognised the ills of monopolies in the old world).

Perhaps we should limit our claims concerning the existence of 'intellectual property', and concur with David's less inflammatory description of the fundamental principles relating to a free market of ideas, inventions, and innovation?

The trouble with monopolies is that they are highly attractive to all who'd anticipate benefiting from them. It seems this selfish greed overshadows what must seem an inconsequential loss of liberty due to everyone else's monopolies that may constrain them in turn.

Ask an artist which they'd prefer out of artistic freedom or control over the use of their published art. It must be natural to seek monopolies that provide such control, even if the monopolies themselves are unnatural.

Alas, monopolies are unethical grants of power, and thus, as this site's slogan notes, the grant of monopoly (however impotent in an artist's hands) corrupts the lesser artist's weakly held principle of artistic freedom.

Crobie,

First of all, the State is an organization that has a legalized monopoly of force over an arbitrarily circumscribed geogrpahical area, and which gains its resources by theft, mainly taxation and inflation. (State-imposed user fees are miniscule.) How does the Constitution bind the State? How does the income tax amendment, or the estate tax, or any of the myriad of other taxes, bind the State? They actually bind the taxpayers, including consumers of taxed goods.

Have a read of article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. You'll notice it's just a grab bag of monopolies, including the progress clause, which gives Congress the alleged right to legislate patents and copyrights. Then, for a great withering critique of the Constitution, see Lyander Spooner's "No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority".

See especially section 3.

The theory that intellectual property is a creation of the mind fails, because (1) everything is a creation of the mind (as well as of the hand--could you write a book without pen or keyboard?), including property that is not conventionally protected as "intellectual property"; and (2) property must have more than thought to be created. A book, for example, requires paper and ink, or a hard drive or other device. Even those physical objects are not enough, not by a long shot. Could books be marketed, indeed even exist, without the efforts of warehousing, trucking, and other delivery organizations, or without the broadband (or narrow band) connections that cover the globe?

If you don't believe me, ask yourself this question. If you were on a desert island, with only food, water, and shelter, could you write a book? Could you create a computer? If so, could you connect to the internet? Could you even create a pencil? (See Leonard Read's great exposition, "I, Pencil.") IOW, "intellectual property" takes a whole lot more to be created than the heroic lone inventor/writer model posits.

And do you call the books on your shelf your "intellectual property" or just your "property"? The theory that "intellectual property" is property also fails, because no one has an exclusive right to something just because he created it. I bought a pen the other day; it was created by someone else. Does the creator have a natural right (as opposed to a state-granted "right") to dictate to me what I can or cannot do with it? Of course not, because I own it and can do whatever I want with it short of using it as a weapon or as a device to deface or to take artistic license with someone else's justly owned property.

Bill:

So, now you rail against dictionaries too.

Bill:

You wrote a long, rambling diatribe, the point of which I am unable to decipher. However, one thing I caught. If I was on a desert island, could I write a book?

Yes. Of course. What does it take to write a book? Merely an instrument to keep track of your writing. There are plenty of materials to use as inks, both plant and animal. Natives have used the barks of various trees for writing for years. Failing that, crude paper may be produced using pulped wood (I assume the desert island has trees). If trees do not exist, time to scavenge for driftwood.

Even lacking paper or a place to put words, the book may still be written in my mind. It will still be a book, it will just not be recorded physically.

The dictionary definition of "intellectual property" is any creation of intellect. Thus, your post is intellectual property. You claim that "intellectual property" is more than the creation of a lone writer, and yet, you did it. Unless you are imaginary.

Copyrights and patents are sometimes called a form of "intellectual property" because they are privileges that you can own and transfer, but the ownership of the monopoly privilege is not to be confused with the ownership of the intellectual property that the privilege concerns.

Intellectual property is not created by copyright and patent. In fact, intellectual property doesn't behave at all like property under copyright and patent. You can say that copyright and patent destroy intellectual property.

One feature of property, for example, is that when you sell it, the new owner controls it, instead of still you. It boggles the mind that people can still confuse something with property if it contradicts this principle.

All you need to do to make intellectual property natural is to treat it analogously to other property.

That means that I don't control your chair, just because I also own a chair. Then means that when I sell you my chair, you now own my chair.

When I invent something, I control my invention. If you invent it, too, you control your invention and I control my invention. That our inventions are similar is irrelevant. When I sell you a copy of my invention, you control your copy of my invention and I control the rest of my copies of my invention. The most natural thing in the world.

It's copyright and patents that make intellectual property feel unnatural. Abolish those and what's your issue with ownership of intellectual property?