The Anti-IP Entitlement Mentality is a ridiculously confused “defense” of IP.
For example:
Whenever an issued patent interferes with this entitlement, the attackers hold it up as an example of how IP rights stifle innovation. This is an easy sell to an audience that already believes in the entitlement to ideas they learned from others. After all, one should be free to execute on unpatented ideas, and anything I can understand should not have been patented, right?
Notice the implicit indignation about the idea that people can use ideas they’ve learned from others! Why, how DARE they! DOWN WITH LEARNING!!
Our dullard goes on:
But that isn’t how things work in America. Our common law notion of property rights included the concept that the first to discover and claim previously undiscovered land would be entitled to a bundle of exclusive rights related to that land (among them, the right to exclude others form using it).
Right, because land is a scarce resource, and to permit it to be used without conflict, the first user is regarded as the owner.
Our intellectual property system followed a similar notion.
No it didn’t. It has nothing to do with Lockean homesteading. It is a pure policy tool. What is this guy jabbering about?
Since you can’t build (or even describe) a new device or improvement until you conceive of the idea,
Or, you know, you learn how to do it from others. But God forbid people learn!
invention (and ultimately, innovation) is physical labor that is necessarily preceded by mental labor. Despite the clumsiness of the constitutional language, the American patent system rewards the first person who successfully engages the mental muscle to conceive of something new, provided that the mental labor is followed by the physical act of (at least) documenting the invention.
This is ridiculous. The patent systems in most of the world reward the first to file not the first to invent; and the US system is about to change to this too. Soon we will be first to file, not first to invent. Will our patent shills find a way to defend this too? The house says yes.
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