I noted before that There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property. A couple of anecdotal factoids confirming this. I’m invited to speak on IP a lot, on occasion to debate; for debates I’m asked to suggest a good opponent. And I am just stumped. I tell you. I don’t know who to suggest.
Also: I was recently invited to contribute the anti-IP chapter, which I have entitled “The Case Against Intellectual Property,” in Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics (Prof. Dr. Christoph Lütge, ed.; Springer, 2013) (chapter 68, in Part 18, “Property Rights: Material and Intellectual,” Robert McGee, section ed.). I was asked to help identify someone to write the pro-IP chapter. I was scratching my head, but scraped the bottom of the barrel and came up with a couple of the only names I could think of … and even they did not work out. So there may be no pro-IP chapter. Hahaha. silly Intellectual Properteers.
I could provide what I consider ethically sound pro-IP arguments, but you don’t like them, and I don’t think the pro-IP camp would like them (they use ‘property’ as a euphemism for monopoly). :-} You’d have to choose between the indignity of being opposed by incoherent gibberish vs the schadenfreude of seeing the pro-IP camp being represented by a copyright and patent abolitionist.
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bemusement? no. you are just a confused engineer type who against all odds has good instincts, but crankish terminology and quasi-scientistic concepts. It is ridiculso to say you are pro-IP but anti-patent. But it’s a free country.
Well, not really, but…
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Sounds sensible to me – to declare that I am pro-property, but anti-monopoly.
Let’s look forward to engineering a free country.
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