From Stefan Molyneux’s post on the Mises forum:
The Freedomain Radio Book Club had a great discussion with Stephan about intellectual property which I thought you might enjoy…
FDR1616 Stephan Kinsella on Intellectual Property from Freedomain Radio
We did this yesterday, Mar. 20, 2010. It was about an hour and was a nice, intelligent discussion of IP and related libertarian issues. (Local MP3 file — 59MB)
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As Ludvig von Mises explained, patents and copyrights are legal devices aimed at enforcing private property rights. Even Murray Rothbard defended copyrights. Yet the “von Mises Institute” persists in attacking patents and copyrights as somehow inconsistent with “Austro-libertarianism”. This is tragic and perverse.
There is no fundamental distinction between “intellectual property” and “physical property”. Individuals create “Intellectual property” by using their ideas to create physical products, such as books, tapes, paintings and inventions. The creators of these forms of property don’t own ideas; they own the printed page or oil-smeared canvas or medicine that they created with their ideas. As the rightful owners of these various products, they have the right to establish the terms under which they volunteer to sell or rent their products to other people. Such terms may include the prohibition of unauthorized knock-offs of their unique inventions. Patents and copyrights codify into law the owner’s prohibition of unauthorized copying. Buyers who resent any such restriction are free to boil in their resentment, while they shop for a better alternative, or invent their own cancer medicine or paint their own portrait.
Like “intellectual property”, “physical property” results from applying some individual’s ideas to physical reality. The utility and market value of a store or hotel has much to do with location, together with other business ideas. Once Jones has acquired title to a lot on which he builds the Jones Inn, Smith cannot occupy that valuable location–even if Jones Inn has room vacancies or spare (“wasted”) lot space. This prohibition on Smith’s occupancy prohibits Smith from “copying Jones’ idea” with respect to location. Is this a grant of “coercive state monopoly privilege”?
Yes, but only in the sense that private property is exclusionary. Smith has not been prohibited from copying Jones’ “idea about location for the Jones Inn”, but he has been excluded from the use of Jones’ ownership of a particular parcel of land.
To summarize: there is no fundamental difference between “intellectual” and “physical” property, or between unauthorized copying and physical tresspass. No one owns ideas; people own what they produce. That the government codifies laws prohibiting unauthorized knowck-offs is identical to its codifying laws against tresspass.
Thanks to the Ludvig von Mises Institute for allowing me to post these ideas on its blog.
There is is a fundamental difference between material and immaterial goods: the definition of their scope. The scope of material property is limited by the four diminsions of physical world (space and time). Immaterial goods on the other hand have no obvious or objective scope. The scope is not empirically observable, depends fully on interpretation and is specific to each person’s thought processes. It can be literally anything.
The problem becomes apparent when I point out to IP proponets that they argue for ownership only of some immaterial goods, and not all, and they do no provide a method of distinguishing between the two. Instead, they use a twodimensional graph whose axes are causality and similarity, draw an arbitrary curve on it and declare the inner part of it “IP”. They do not explain the shape of the curve. They are unwilling to provide a method of distinguishing between externalities and “IP” on the causality scale, or between substitutes and “IP” on the similarity scale.
The only method to give immaterial goods unambigious interpersonal scope is to define it in a contract. Therefore, there cannot be a trespass with regards to immaterial goods, only contract violations.
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