Against Intellectual Property has been translated into Italian by Mr. Robert Newson: Contro La Proprietà Intellettuale (.doc file). Translations into Spanish, Polish, Portugese and Georgian have been made as well.

[Mises; SK]

John Perry Barlow's 1994 Wired article, "The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age," tagged: "(Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)", is a classic. Written at the dawn of the Internet, it's amazing how non-dated it is. It's a fascinating, well-written, and insightful paper about the problems of applying classical notions of IP to the digital age. A few choice nuggets:

Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting spectrum (which, in fact, rather resembles what is being attempted here). We will need to develop an entirely new set of methods as befits this entirely new set of circumstances.

Most of the people who actually create soft property - the programmers, hackers, and Net surfers - already know this. Unfortunately, neither the companies they work for nor the lawyers these companies hire have enough direct experience with nonmaterial goods to understand why they are so problematic. They are proceeding as though the old laws can somehow be made to work, either by grotesque expansion or by force. They are wrong.

... the increasing difficulty of enforcing existing copyright and patent laws is already placing in peril the ultimate source of intellectual property - the free exchange of ideas.

... when the primary articles of commerce in a society look so much like speech as to be indistinguishable from it, and when the traditional methods of protecting their ownership have become ineffectual, attempting to fix the problem with broader and more vigorous enforcement will inevitably threaten freedom of speech. The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent.

... Since it is now possible to convey ideas from one mind to another without ever making them physical, we are now claiming to own ideas themselves and not merely their expression. And since it is likewise now possible to create useful tools that never take physical form, we have taken to patenting abstractions, sequences of virtual events, and mathematical formulae - the most unreal estate imaginable. In certain areas, this leaves rights of ownership in such an ambiguous condition that property again adheres to those who can muster the largest armies. The only difference is that this time the armies consist of lawyers.

... To the extent that law and established social practice exists in this area, they are already in dangerous disagreement. The laws regarding unlicensed reproduction of commercial software are clear and stern...and rarely observed. Software piracy laws are so practically unenforceable and breaking them has become so socially acceptable that only a thin minority appears compelled, either by fear or conscience, to obey them. When I give speeches on this subject, I always ask how many people in the audience can honestly claim to have no unauthorized software on their hard disks. I've never seen more than 10 percent of the hands go up.

Whenever there is such profound divergence between law and social practice, it is not society that adapts. Against the swift tide of custom, the software publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law.

... In the hick town I come from, they don't give you much credit for just having ideas. You are judged by what you can make of them. As things continue to speed up, I think we see that execution is the best protection for those designs which become physical products. Or, as Steve Jobs once put it, "Real artists ship." The big winner is usually the one who gets to the market first (and with enough organizational force to keep the lead).

A few quibbles: Barlow does not seem to find classical IP as applied to material property to be very problematic; he seems to think it's problematic only when applied to digital information. But as the latter is his focus, this is only a minor quibble. The article starts to get more metaphorical, less rigorous, when he tries to develop "A Taxonomy of Information," but even this section is still insightful.

And though, as alluded to above, the article is not as dated as one might expect, there is a line that might be revised with the benefit of hindsight:

All of the broadcast-support models are flawed. Support either by advertisers or government has almost invariably tainted the purity of the goods delivered. Besides, direct marketing is gradually killing the advertiser-support model anyway.

The subsequent success of Google's ad-dominated business model calls this bit into question. Still, a great piece.

[Mises post; SK post]

So says Adam Mossoff, Objectivist law professor, here:

Just FYI, I am just about to complete my first draft of my article, tentatively titled, "A Value-Based Theory of Intellectual Property," in which I explain why intellectual property rights are a fundamental property right. In fact, my thesis can be summed up as: All Property is Intellectual Property. As far as I'm aware, this will be the first full-length academic treatment of IP that is not only based on Rand's ethical and political theory, but also contextualizes this IP theory vis-a-vis both the Lockean labor theory of property and the utilitarian scarcity theory of property.

Of course, Kinsella and the other scarcity-based advocates for property rights with the libertarian movement, such as Timothy Sandefur, are appropriately taken down in my paper. I'm presenting my draft at the APA meeting at the end of this month in NYC, and, hopefully, I'll have a draft up on the SSRN website by the spring. So, people will either have to come to the APA meeting or they'll have to wait a few more months to download a draft.

I discussed Mossoff before in Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors. This was posted as a comment to An Objectivist Recants on IP??, a post by Objectivist Greg Perkins, who previously wrote DON'T STEAL THIS ARTICLE: On the Libertarian Critique of Intellectual Property (discussed in my post Elaborations on Randian IP). Perkins's post was a response to the Mises post An Objectivist Recants on IP; as I noted there, and in response to him on his post:

Greg,

For those interested, I've laid out why I think the entire Objectivist case for IP is flawed and unlibertarian in various articles and posts. I list these below; I encourage those Objectivists seriously interested IP to consider these arguments.

Articles: "Intellectual Property and Libertarianism" (in particular see here and the section on Libertarian Creationism); also "The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide"; for an alternative to the Randian approach to rights and politics, see What Libertarianism Is.

Media: I discuss problems with Rand's view at length on the Peter Mac show and at the Mises University this year; also The Intellectual Property Quagmire, or, The Perils of Libertarian Creationism.

Blog posts: Rand on IP, Owning "Values", and "Rearrangement Rights"; Libertarian Creationism; Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors; Inventors are Like Unto …GODS…. Also these blog posts: Intellectual Products and the Right to Private Property; New Working Paper: Machan on IP; Owning Thoughts and Labor; also Elaborations on Randian IP; and Objectivists on IP.

I'm not surprised has to claim that all property is intellectual property; this is at the root of the more consistent, but extreme and absurd, views of IP, such as those of Rand and Galambos. As I noted in Rand on IP, Owning "Values", and "Rearrangement Rights":

In Jeff Tucker's superb article If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others?, he notes Rand's increasing focus on exalting the creator and elevating "intellectual rights" to such a height that they totally trump real rights. This is no exaggeration. As I noted in Against Intellectual Property, Rand actually, incredibly said that "patents are the heart and core of property rights." See also my post Inventors are Like Unto …. GODS….., noting Objectivist IP attorney Murray Franck approvingly repeating this quote: "intellectual property is after all the only absolute possession in the world."

And Galambos believed that man has "primary" property rights in his thoughts and ideas, and secondary property rights in tangible goods; see Against Intellectual Property. So, for those who take IP seriously, they have to relegate property in real things to lowly secondary status, and exalt patterns, information, ideas, "values," reputations, labor, a right to profit from labor, etc. etc. So no, it's no surprise Mossoff, trying to defend this system and take it seriously, ends up concluding that all rights are intellectual property.

As noted in the various posts and articles linked above, rights in "value," patterns, reputation rights, a Marxian-type labor theory of value, etc., all arise when rights to ideas are made primary.

Of course, as Rand herself knew, men are not ghosts; as she said, "Only a ghost can exist without material property." When she was thinking clearly she also knew that there cannot really be property rights in values or "creations"; as she once wrote:

The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power and it is the only meaning of the concept "creative." "Creation" does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. "Creation" means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before.

She should have realized that this means there cannot be property rights in value since this would have to mean property rights in arrangements or patterns, which would then give the owner of the arrangement rights in other people's already-owned property. If she had kept her focus on the fact that rearranging already-existing property can indeed make that property more valuable, she would have realized that creation (rearrangement) is not an independent source of property rights: if you rearrange your own property, even if this makes it more valuable, you already owned the property that you have rearranged (made more valuable). Yet this does not give you rights in other people's property. You can re-word the Randian view as follows: if you make your property more valuable, it gives you additional property rights-the right to prevent other people from making their own property more valuable. And this makes it all the more obviously flawed.

More on this in Rand on IP, Owning "Values", and "Rearrangement Rights". The Randian system, however, applied consistently, would lead to stagnation and death, total absurdity from the point of view of justice. No action in the real world would be possible, as IP would be much broader in scope and term than now--no reason to limit IP to original artistic works (copyright) or practical inventions (patents), it would also have to cover not only reputation (another way we "create value") but abstract ideas, clothing designs, philosophical systems, anything you can imagine that "has value" ... and the term would have to last forever; it couldn't stop at 20 or 120 years. After all, property rights don't expire.

And so we would end up with a stagnant, dead society where no one was allowed to do anything, because every action would have to employ knowledge and implement patterns someone else thought of... man would be trapped in a prison of having to ask permission for every single action worse than imaginable even in the most totalitarian regime. Life would be by permission, not by right; and it would be impossible to obtain the millions of permissions needed. As I noted in Against Intellectual Property, pp. 27-28:

By widening the scope of IP, and by lengthening its duration to avoid making such arbitrary distinctions as Rand does, the absurdity and injustice caused by IP becomes even more pronounced (as Galambos demonstrates). And by extending the term of patents and copyrights to infinity, subsequent generations would be choked by ever-growing restraints on their own use of property. No one would be able to manufacture or even use a light bulb without getting permission from Edison's heirs. No one would even be able to build a house without getting permission from the heirs of the first protohuman who left the caves and built a hut. No one could use a variety of life-saving techniques, chemicals, or treatments without obtaining permission of various lucky, rich descendants. No one would be able to boil water to purify it, or use pickling to preserve foods, unless he is granted license by the originators (or their distant heirs) of such techniques.

Such unbounded ideal rights would pose a serious threat to tangible-property rights, and would threaten to overwhelm them. All use of tangible property would by now be impossible, as every conceivable use of property, every single action, would be bound to infringe upon one of the millions of past, accreted IP rights, and the human race would die of starvation. But, as Rand noted, men are not ghosts; we have a spiritual aspect, but also a physical one.[54] Any system that elevates rights in ideas to such an extreme that it overrides rights in tangible things is clearly not a suitable ethical system for living, breathing human beings. No one living can actually act in accordance with such an unrestricted view of IP. The remaining advocates of IP all qualify their endorsement by limiting the scope and/or terms of IP rights, thus adopting the ethically arbitrary distinctions noted above.

In other words, if you take a principled approach to IP, you endorse a system that condemns society to stagnation and death. So most proponents, like Rand, realizing this, start making ad hoc, unprincipled, utilitarian exceptions to avoid the most obvious, harsh consequences of a principled implementation of their confused IP ideas.

[Mises post; SK post]

From my comment on this thread:

Re the issue of the prices charged for things like apples etc.--see my post Imagining the Fate of Copyright in a Future World.

Imagine 1000 years from now, if we still have these ridiculous IP laws .... Say you need some music--to play in your department store's elevators, to go with a scene in a movie, etc.--you can choose between an almost infinite supply of older, public domain work, or pay for a new tune that is still under copyright. That will force new works' price to be almost zero.

One concern I have is that the IP socialists would at that point come up with a new IP right--basically a renewal of copyright held by someone who "rediscovers" older work forgotten in the almost infinite pile of public domain work. Imagine living in a world where Michael Jackson's work, or the music of the 70s, had been basically forgotten and lost, a needle in a haystack, surpassed by all the music over the ensuing centuries ... then some DJ starts playing it, people rediscover it anew.. shouldn't he get credit for this? After all, it takes a lot of work to loook thru all the old stuff and find "what to recommend" (a lot of IP law is based on the Marxian labor theory of value, the idea that you should be rewarded if you labor on something, as in the old "sweat of the brow" copyright law doctrine). Shouldn't the discoverer be rewarded for this? After all, if he's not, you consumers would never have heard of Michael Jackson, would not have the pleasure of knowing what (free) tracks to play at your party. What's the harm of awarding the DJ a monopoly? After all, you would never have found that needle in an infinite haystack, so no one is worse off, and everyone is better off. Copyright can never die; it only gets reincarnated. O brave new world! That has such laws in't!

Well, not exactly, but this delightful anecdote by Taki has a quasi-Galambosian ring to it (Galambos, you may recall, was the hyper-IP libertarian fringe personality from "California").

When the Marx Brothers announced in 1946 that their upcoming film was called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Warner had produced the great hit "Casablanca" four years earlier, and insisted the funny men were trying to cash in on it. But Groucho was no slouch. He had his lawyer threaten Warner Brothers with breach of copyright for using the word brothers. The Marx boys won, as they were brothers before the Warners had formed the company. A Night in Casablanca turned out also to be a great hit.

On the Mises blog, I noticed one of the frequent commentators on IP-related blog threads, one Bala, used to defend the IP position but of late had been taking an anti-IP position. We discussed this privately and I asked him to give me a short write-up about his thought process as he changed his mind on this issue. I find such "conversion" stories interesting, and have seen it in others as well--myself, Jeff Tucker, etc. He sent it to me; I append it below.

Pro-IP to Anti-IP: The Transformation of an Objectivist

by S Balasubramanian

[The author resides in Chennai, India, and has a B Tech (Aerospace Engineering)--Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras ('94), PGDM (equivalent of an MBA)--Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad ('98). He is a businessman, running a test prep company that trains students for competitive examinations for admissions to institutions of higher education, especially for those aspiring to get into the top B-Schools in India. He also recently started a pre-school which he hopes to build into a full-fledged school.]

It was in August of 2009 that I stumbled, or rather fumbled, my way into mises.org. I was guided to LvMI by none other than the Ayn Rand Institute, which referred LvMI as the place to go to if I wanted to get any understanding at all of economics, especially capitalism. As a long-time fan of Ayn Rand, having read a lot of her fiction as well as non-fiction and actually applying the basic principles of Objectivism in my daily life, I decided to take the tip seriously.

Pretty much to my shock, almost the first thing I came across was a little Rand-bashing and, worse, a denunciation of an idea Rand had explained as being the cornerstone of property rights - that of Intellectual Property.

The ideas I came in with

My ideas on intellectual property were formed almost completely based on Rand's arguments justifying the idea. It all begins with the fundamental premises that:

1. Ideas are legitimate property;
2. Ideas owe their existence to the person who originated or "created them" and hence morally "belong" to the creator.
   1. It is important for a reader to understand that Objectivists use the term "morally" differently. Morality, to an Objectivist, is a code of values that guides man's actions in the face of choices. It is rationally derived starting with recognition of the Objective reality that we are a part of. It is not a set of edicts or diktats from a higher authority.
   2. Those who copy ideas deprive the creators of the value that should rightfully accrue to them and are hence guilty of stealing (the emphasis is on "rightfully" as it flows from point 2 above).
   3. It is the fundamental responsibility of government to protect individual rights, property rights being the most important of man's rights.
   4. A system of patent & copyrights is a way by which creators register their claim to creating ideas, a means by which they inform all interested parties as to whose property an idea is
   5. Infringement of patents and copyrights is a violation of property rights and government enforcement of patent & copyright laws is legitimate protection of property rights.

Questions that troubled me

In the course of some heated discussions, a few interesting questions came up for which I had to reach deep inside to find the answers

1. How do you reconcile the facts that recognising and enforcing IP essentially gives some people a right to the physical property of others?
2. How can ideas and patterns be property?
3. How do you propose to enforce IP except through the State machinery? Considering that the State has never demonstrated any tendency other than for evil, how is this consistent with the advancement of Liberty?

What made me realise the error in my (and the "orthodox" Objectivist) position on IP

To cut a long thing short, the moment I realised that there is a conflict between rights to intellectual property and rights to physical property, I also realised that something is wrong about the whole thing. Such a contradiction usually means that something is wrong with the premises of the person facing the contradiction - me.

Restricting a person from giving physical shape to an idea he has in his mind is clearly a violation of his Liberty and Property Rights. However, this is precisely what implementation of IP means. IP proponents typically tent to retort saying that what I am calling "violation of Liberty and Property Rights" is actually implementation of the property rights of the owner of the idea/pattern that is the subject of the IP.

If it is true that in the name of protecting Intellectual Property Rights, one is actually violating the Liberty of some individuals, in effect one is also saying that the holders of Intellectual Property have an undefined lien on the Liberty of the individuals of the other part. Translated, this gives some individuals the right to enslave others by virtue of being holders of Intellectual Property rights. This made the notion all the more bizarre to me. It was in direct contradiction of the most basic principles of Objectivism that no man may claim the right to initiate force against another.

This led me to realise that there is a fundamental problem in the way different people were defining the concept "property". At least, the way Objectivists seem to be defining "property", they are setting themselves up for a conflict between the right to physical property and the right to Liberty on one side and the right to Intellectual Property on the other.

The answer, to me, was to obtain clarity on the relationship between the Right to Liberty and the Right to Property. The question I was trying to answer was "Which of the 2 rights is more fundamental to human nature?". If Liberty is more fundamental to human nature, it would be futile to define Property independent of Liberty because such a definition is bound to lead to a contradiction.

Liberty or Property - Which is more fundamental?

To me, the answer was obvious - Liberty. The Right to Liberty is a logical corollary of the Right to Life and is in fact a restatement of the latter focusing on a specific part of it. The Right to Liberty, as per Objectivism, is nothing more than the freedom to act as per the judgement of one's rational mind. Action being essential to life and in fact being an integral and inviolable part of the definition of the concept "Life" (a sequence of self-generated self-sustaining actions), violation of the Right to Liberty is a violation of the Right to Life itself.

Once again taking from Rand herself, value is that which you act to gain or keep. Thus, gaining or keeping value is impossible unless one is free to act. Thus, it is futile to place "property", which is nothing more than the value one acts to gain or keep with the aim of sustaining one's life, above that which is a prerequisite to the process of gaining or keeping value, i.e., action. Translating this into a simple inequality,

Right to Life > Right to Liberty > Right to Property

Therefore, the choice was clear - to define the concept "property" in terms of the more fundamental concept "liberty". The outcome is bound to be a non-contradictory system of Property Rights where it is possible for Liberty and Property Rights to coexist.

Defining the concept "Property"

(The most fundamental premise I used in this discussion is that initiating force against another is a violation of his Right to Liberty. As per my limited understanding of Objectivism, this is how Ayn Rand defined Liberty.)

Objects exist in 3 states - existent, possession and property. An apple exists. When I hold the apple in my hands, it is in my possession. When my possession is morally justified, i.e., when the apple "ought" to be in my possession, it is deemed my "property".

Clearly, not every "possession" is "property". That raises the question how and when a "possession" becomes "property". The answer to the question is to be found by a study of the morality of the actions that went into gaining and keeping "possession". If you obtain possession the "right" way, it is morally yours, i.e., you are better off with it than without. On the other hand, if you did something "wrong" in the process of gaining possession, it is not morally yours, i.e., you are better off without it than with it. Objectivists in particular should have no difficulty evaluating issues from a moral perspective and to talk of issues like "right" and "wrong" because they ought to be used to deriving these logically from reality, which they consider absolute.

From an Objectivist perspective, there is only 1 "wrong" that a man can commit in the process of gaining possession of an existent - that is to initiate force against other men in the process. Thus, possessions to gain which man has to necessarily initiate force against others will not get moral sanction. Such possessions cannot be considered property.

Equally fundamental to the concept "property" is the right to exclude others from total or partial enjoyment of the value that the property holds. Exclusion of others requires specific actions from the person in possession of an object. The nature of the actions one needs to undertake in order to exclude others from one's possessions also influences the moral status of the possession in question. If excluding others requires retaliatory force only, such exclusion would be a morally sound action. If, on the other hand, exclusion itself involves initiation of force, it would naturally be immoral and the author cannot exclude and be right at the same time. Such possessions that create contradictions by their very nature cannot and should not be deemed property.

Applying this idea to the 2 broad categories of property - physical and intellectual, physical possessions clearly justify the use of the term "property" to denote their ownership. The taking possession of or the exclusion of others from physical objects does not necessarily involve initiation of force. On the other hand, the taking away of a physical good without the consent of the legitimate owner always involves the initiation of force. Thus, the statement "no man shall take away the physical property of another man without his consent" is equivalent to saying that "one man may not initiate force against another". In this sense, it is no different from the basic Objectivist principle of non-initiation of force.

Ideas and patterns, on the other hand, presented a problem when I tried to treat them as "property". While there is no denying the value of ideas in human advancement, exclusion of other individuals from an idea or pattern necessarily involves the initiation of force. For instance, how else is A to prevent B from incorporating A's idea in his B's product other than to force himself upon B's property and coerce B to prevent him from doing so, thus violating B's Liberty? In effect, recognising ideas and patterns as property is tantamount to saying that A has a moral right to initiate force against B simply because he has coined an idea. Thus, as an Objectivist, classifying ideas and patterns as "property" takes me into dangerous territory where I am ready to label the initiation of force as legitimate.

Even worse than the above is to codify IP into law and giving the State and its machinery additional legitimacy engage in rampant violation of Liberty. As an Objectivist, I hate the State as much as anyone else can. To see the State as an ally just because it is the only agency capable of enforcing Intellectual Property Rights is downright immoral. I realised that once there, there was no turning back. I become as evil as the very collectivists and statists that I am trying to condemn and fight against.

I am now left with a very moral choice - do I or do I not recognise ideas and patterns as "property". If I should remain true to my Objectivist roots (which I value for good reason), my only option is to apologise to Rand for disagreeing with her strongly and telling her that she was wrong on this one and that I am not ready to apply the label "property" to ideas and patterns.

(While in the above analysis, I might appear to be going in circles around essentially 1 idea, the non-initiation of force, given that that principle is the most important Objectivist social principle, the one that defines how an individual ought to deal with the society he lives in, I do not think I am guilty of circular reasoning. Rather, I am making my axioms clear and validating all my conclusions against my axioms.)

Conclusions

An Objectivist cannot and should not support the notion of Intellectual Property because it violates fundamental Objectivist principles. Rejecting the validity of "Intellectual Property" does not mean that one is rejecting Objectivism. Anyone who claims otherwise needs to be reminded of Ayn Rand's warnings against package deals. He who wishes to say "Rand said otherwise" needs to be reminded of Rand's other very important point - that no human may consider himself or any other human being to be infallible, not even Ayn Rand herself.

[Mises crosspost; SK crosspost]

Jeff Tucker's Bonfire of the Missalettes is fighting the IP forces inside the Catholic Church!

Someone recently told me "I just ran across a few of your interviews and writings. I was particularly impressed with the point that IP creates scarcity where none existed before. Despite its obviousness, it is characteristic of IP that had not occurred to me before."

So I thought I would elaborate a bit on this. The "artificial scarcity" insight is indeed a good one, but it is not mine. From pp. 33-34 of Against Intellectual Property:

Ideas are not naturally scarce. However, by recognizing a right in an ideal object, one creates scarcity where none existed before. As Arnold Plant explains:

It is a peculiarity of property rights in patents (and copyrights) that they do not arise out of the scarcity of the objects which become appropriated. They are not a consequence of scarcity. They are the deliberate creation of statute law, and, whereas in general the institution of private property makes for the preservation of scarce goods, tending . . . to lead us "to make the most of them," property rights in patents and copyrights make possible the creation of a scarcity of the products appropriated which could not otherwise be maintained.[64]

Bouckaert also argues that natural scarcity is what gives rise to the need for property rules, and that IP laws create an artificial, unjustifiable scarcity. As he notes:

Natural scarcity is that which follows from the relationship between man and nature. Scarcity is natural when it is possible to conceive of it before any human, institutional, contractual arrangement. Artificial scarcity, on the other hand, is the outcome of such arrangements. Artificial scarcity can hardly serve as a justification for the legal framework that causes that scarcity. Such an argument would be completely circular. On the contrary, artificial scarcity itself needs a justification.[65]

Thus, Bouckaert maintains that "only naturally scarce entities over which physical control is possible are candidates for" protection by real property rights.[66] For ideal objects, the only protection possible is that achievable through personal rights, i.e., contract (more on this below).

[64] Arnold Plant, "The Economic Theory Concerning Patents for Inventions," p. 36. Also Mises, Human Action, p. 364: "Such recipes are, as a rule, free goods as their ability to produce definite effects is unlimited. They can become economic goods only if they are monopolized and their use is restricted. Any price paid for the services rendered by a recipe is always a monopoly price. It is immaterial whether the restriction of a recipe's use is made possible by institutional conditions such as patents and copyright laws or by the fact that a formula is kept secret and other people fail to guess it." [For more on Mises's view of IP, see Mises on Intellectual Property.]

[65] Boudewijn Bouckaert, What Is Property? (text version) in "Symposium: Intellectual Property," Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990), p. 793; see also pp. 797-99.

[66] Bouckaert, "What is Property?" pp. 799, 803.

Bouckaert's paper, What Is Property? (text version), is, by the way, superb and highly recommended.

Update: Jeff Tucker's article and recent speech had me thinking about something that ties into this post well. People want to impose artificial scarcity on non-scarce things because they think scarcity is good. But they have it backwards. If anything, we should want material things to be non-scarce.

In Tucker's talk, he was pointing out the difference between scarce resources and non-scarce, infinitely reproducible ones. Yes, they are different, but I think we also need to combat another fallacious view: people seem to implicitly think it's bad that ideas are infinitely reproducible. This is a "problem" we need to combat by making them artificially scarce. But it's a good thing. i.e., at least ideas are non-scarce; but unfortunately, material things are scarce. But it would be good if material things were more abundant. So imagine that some benevolent genius invents a matter-copying device that lets you just point it at some distant object, and instantly duplicate it for free for you. So I see a coat you are wearing, click a button, and now I have an identical copy. I see you having a nice steak, and duplicate it. Etc. This would make us all infinitely wealthy. It would be great. Of course people would fear the "unemploymetn" it would cause--hey, I want to be unemployed and rich! And the rich would hate it because they would now not be special. They couldn't lord their Rolls Royces and diamonds over the poor; the poor would have all that (it would be similar to how audiophiles were irked by the advent of the CD so tried to find granite turntables etc. to pretend they were still better). So imagine a rich guy suing a guy who "copied" his car.... imagine farmers suing people who copied their crops to keep from starving... how absurd! And what damages would they ask for? Not monetary damages--the defendant could just print up wealth to pay him off! So the only remedy he could want would be to punish or impoversih the defendant... for satisfation, to once again feel superior. How sick. As my friend Rob Wicks noted, you could imagine a short story based on this in which judge orders a famine as a remedy to crop-copying.

Rebellion in the Red: Manifesto (google translation) notes Spanish legislation allowing the suspension of Internet service to users "to safeguard the rights of intellectual property" has caused a huge backlash. Journalists, bloggers, users, professionals and Internet developers have put forth a statement "In defense of fundamental rights on the Internet", which includes:

1. Copyright can not be above the fundamental rights of citizens, including the right to privacy, security, the presumption of innocence, to effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

People are beginning to recognize the growing conflict between individual rights and "intellectual property"--and, if forced to choose, are choosing real, individual rights over IP. Hopefully it won't stop here.

(HT to Keith Krauland for the link)

[Mises cross-post; SK cross-post]

On the latest This Week in Tech, guest panelist and sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle has an interesting anecdote about his involvement with a copyright squabble between Fox and Universal in the 1970s concerning Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. As noted on Wikipedia:

Battlestar Galactica was finally produced in the wake of the success of the 1977 film Star Wars. In fact, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios (the studio behind Battlestar Galactica) for copyright infringement, claiming that it had stolen 34 distinct ideas from Star Wars. Universal promptly countersued, claiming Star Wars had stolen ideas from the 1972 film Silent Running (notably the robot "drones") and the Buck Rogers serials of the 1940s.

Pournelle says [go to about 1:15:45 of the TWiT episode] that after Universal was sued by Fox, he was paid $20,000 by Universal to help show that BG was not too similar to Star Wars. Pournelle says that to write a brief showing there was no plagiarism. He says,

I looked at it, and said, why, that's easy. If you ask me which is the better movie, then no question, Star Wars is the better one. But if you ask me which is the most original, there ain't an original frame in either one of 'em! They're both derivative from fiction that was published centuries ago--for instance the male-pair bonding between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker was echoed in Battlestar Galactica--I said, yeah, and they both got it from Homer, didn't they?

(See also Battlestar Galactica Dubbed "Too Expensive" and "Star Wars Ripoff"; The Top Five Most Ridiculous Legal Disputes Involving Lucasfilm, the latter of which lists the #1 most ridculous lawsuit as follows: "Star Wars blatantly rips off Universal's Silent Running. Universal's Battlestar Galactica overtly steals from Star Wars. No one acknowledges that every sci-fi movie is a variant of other sci-fi movies. Lawsuits are filed.")

[Mises blog cross-post; SK cross-post]