Wang, Intellectual Property: Natural Right or State Privilege?

Excellent new article: Sebastian Wang, “Intellectual Property: Natural Right or State Privilege?“,   Libertarian Alliance (UK) (27 October, 2025)

Related:

Re: “Gordon (1993) argues that the chain of title for intellectual property is cleaner than for tangible property”:

• The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists
• Munger on Property Rights in Words and Information
• A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”
• The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property
• New Working Paper: Machan on IP
• Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory: Transcript

On Locke and IP:

• Conversation with Sabhlok re Locke and Intellectual Property as a Natural Right or Property Right
• Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’
• “Intellectual Property” in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism, n.5: Ronan Deazley, “The Myth of Copyright at Common Law,” Cambridge L. J. 62, no. 1, pp. 106-133; Liam Séamus O’Melinn, “The Recording Industry v. James Madison, aka “Publius”: The Inversion of Culture and Copyright,” Seattle U.L. Rev. 35, no. 1 (2011): 75–133, pp. 79, 103 (citing Abrams and Deazley: “common law and natural law copyright are fictions”; common-law copyright has been “fully and formally discredited”).
• Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward: Quoting Tom Bell:
  

  As our careful review of the historical record has showed … the Founders probably did not regard copyright as a natural right.^[90]

  In support of his contentions here, Bell cites Ronan Deazley, who “reads Locke’s correspondence to indicate that ‘Locke himself did not consider [that] his theory of property extended to intellectual properties such as copyrights and patents,’ and instead recognized that it could exist only [by] grace of parliamentary action.”^[91]

  ^[91] Ibid., p. 192 n.52, quoting Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006)), at 144 n.32. See also Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Lockean Arguments for Private Property,” in Munzer, ed., New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property (https://perma.cc/3TWB-4Z8A), p. 141:

  Despite the attractions of a Lockean approach and its apparent amenability to intellectual property, I side with Jefferson. I will challenge the claim that Lockean foundations straightforwardly support most strong natural rights over intellectual works—such things as articles, plays, books, songs, paintings, methods, processes, and other inventions. I will also challenge the related claim that Lockean foundations for strong property rights come easier for these forms of intellectual property than for real property. As Jefferson observed and as I hope to explain, the nature of intellectual works makes them less, rather than more, susceptible to Lockean justifications for private appropriation.

Related:

• The Problem with Intellectual Property
• Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property
• Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes
• The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright
• Renaming Intellectual Property
• Intellectual Poverty
• Classificationism, Legislation, Copyright
• The Mountain of IP Legislation
• The Superiority of the Roman Law: Scarcity, Property, Locke and Libertarianism
• Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property
• Thoughts on Intellectual Property, Scarcity, Labor-ownership, Metaphors, and Lockean Homesteading
• Libertarian and Lockean Creationism: Creation As a Source of Wealth, not Property Rights; Hayek’s “Fund of Experience”; the Distinction Between Scarce Means and Knowledge as Guides to Action
•  IP is Not “Not Property”
• KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory
• Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging

***

Sebastian Wang, “Intellectual Property: Natural Right or State Privilege?“,   Libertarian Alliance (UK) (27 October, 2025)

Introduction: Reconsidering Property and Privilege

“Indeed it might be helpful to rethink the language used to describe IPRs and call them instead intellectual property privileges, which is what they are, and thus remove the possible confusion with human rights.” — Friends World Committee for Consultation

This remark, submitted by the Quaker United Nations Office in 2001 to the Commission on Human Rights, is more than semantic fastidiousness. It speaks to a foundational question in legal and political philosophy: What do we mean by property? The phrase intellectual property rights is so widely used that it has become, for many, an unquestioned legal category—something as natural as rights to land or a physical object. Yet a moment’s scrutiny reveals how loaded the term is.

The phrase suggests a parallel between tangible goods—my coat, my house, my car—and the intangible products of the mind: novels, inventions, musical compositions. But the analogy does not hold easily. Tangible goods are scarce and rivalrous. If I take your umbrella, you no longer have it. If I copy your poem, you still do. And so the very use of the word property already frames the debate in a certain direction, urging us to think of intangibles as if they were material, and therefore as if they merit the same institutional protection.

A more precise way to approach this debate is by distinguishing between two categories of entitlement:

1. If an institution or right would exist in a stateless society where property rights are respected, it may be presumed legitimate as a natural right.
2. If it would not exist without active state enforcement, it may still be useful—but the burden of justification lies on those who impose it.

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This is another excellent piece from the Libertarian Alliance (UK).