Related:
- The Problem with Intellectual Property
- Types of Intellectual Property
- Aggression” versus “Harm” in Libertarianism
- Ontology mistake:
- The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists
- Objectivists: “All Property is Intellectual Property”
- A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”
- Stephan Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part IV.I. In particular, references in notes 75-76 et pass.
- KOL483 | The Economics and Ethics of Intellectual Property, Loyola University—New Orleans
- On the term “property” referring not to owned things: Libertarian Answer Man: Self-ownership for slaves and Crusoe; and Yiannopoulos on Accurate Analysis and the term “Property”; Mises distinguishing between juristic and economic categories of “ownership”
- Janich and one’s hands:
- Another way to explain the problem with IP: Resources v. Knowledge; Ownership v. Possession
See Copyright, Moral Rights, and Subjective Authorial Harm: CIPIL Evening Seminar.
This shows the utter incoherence of modern legal “intellectual property” theory. I have long condemned the most harmful forms of IP, patent and copyright, as well as the more well known forms, trademark and trade secret, as well as the reputation rights of defamation law. And there are others, including an aspect of copyright called moral rights: inalienable rights to attribution and to the “integrity” of the work, whatever that means. Just listen to the confused pseudophilosophical musings of this guy. It’s almost unbearable to hear him jabber on in this legal positivist way, anchored to nothing, going from metaphor to amateur Total Recall thought experiments. Rambling on about how one’s “memories” of having “created” something is what “matters” to him, and how violating that “thing”s integrity “harms” him, blah blah blah.
The main theories of IP are Lockean—based on Lockean creationism—and utilitarian; a third, more obscure, even more inscrutable one is the Hegelian “personality” argument which this guy, wittingly or not, is partly relying on.
This moral rights argument is bound up in the personality theory stuff, plus a smattering of the Lockean and ontological arguments others throw at the wall: any “thing” that exists “ontologically” was “created” and “has an owner”. Blah blah blah. It also makes the mistake of thinking the law ought to prohibit causing harm instead of prohibiting conflict, use of others’ owned things, trespass: nonconsensual uses of or invasions of others owned resources (erroneously and widely called “their property”).1
These people never stop to ask: what are the types of things that exist over which there can be conflict, and to which property rights can apply in the first place. The things we wield physically by manipulating them with our actual hands are scarce means of action—ownable resources. Other “things” “exist” in the world, and “matter”—i.e., the concepts we use to understand this complicated world are useful and have referents—in addition to scarce resources, physical, conflictable things that serve as means of action and that can be owned and are subject to property rights precisely because there can be physical conflict over them, the world is in a sense “ontologically rich” and consists of lots of varied concepts that has as there referents any number of other things: love, pain, time, knowledge and ideas, meaning, beauty, truth, evil, games, sports, contradictions, numbers, actions, leisure, pleasure, language, letters, contemplation…. just because there is a valid concept does not mean the referent of that concept “exists” as the type of thing that can be owned. I have a wife, an age, a child, a country, and my car has a color and age and weight. I don’t own any of these things. I don’t own my actions. I don’t own knowledge. It is useful in action. It is not a scarce means of action. It is the knowledge that guides the use of resources. Of all the types of things that “exist”–that is, for which there is a valid concept having a referent–only conflictable resource can be owned and subject to property rights as only the things have that nature, that they can lead to conflict.
The Lockean creationists and personality theory and pie in the sky “ontologists” make the mistake of thinking that if a concept is valid, if it has a referent, “thing” that can therefore be said to exist, then the question then is: who owns it? The natural answer, in the case of truly “created” things (like ideas, even if all of them are in fact incremental and necessarily build on others). But they skip the first question: can it be owned. The answer is NO to all the things they think can be owned: ideas, reputations; and there is no “right” to “not be harmed.” Now wonder the world is a mess. Normal people, farmers, manual workers, know what it means to deal with real things they can manipulate with their hands. Only statists and intellectuals could come up with something as insane is the idea of personality rights, reputation rights, “intellectual property” rights, etc.
ALL this confusion is addressed in the content above.
- [↩]
