Intellectual property is as real as real property, and intellectual property rights just as important, and just as much under attack -- and from some odd quarters.
Greg Perkins at Noodle Food answers several libertarian critics of intellectual property rights. Long, but well worth it.
LINKS: Don't steal this article - Greg Perkins, Noodle Food
TAGS: Property, Property_Rights, Economics, Libertarianism, Objectivism
2 comments:
The propertarian justification for IP is misguided, or so I argue here.
Richard, as always if you have to distort a position in order to argue against it (as you do once again) or give it your own label in order to misrepresent it (as you've done) then it suggests that you haven't got an argument against that position. Your argument as presented is simply absurd -- perhaps best represented by your claim that recognising intellectual property rights makes singing in the shower illegal -- and ends up justifying some intellectual property rights on no moral basis whatsoever. How long would that last?
For an actual summary of Greg's argument, I suggest readers simply read Greg's argument and the subsequent comments -- and also Rand's own arguments in her essay 'Patents & Copyrights' that he recommends re-reading at least twice.
As I've said here many times, the basis for property rights is the human need for production in order to ensure survival and flourishing; the creation of human wealth represents new values being brought into the world, and as such those values rightly belong to the person or persons who created those values. The nature of wealth creation and the link between the creation of value and the protection of property rights is the same for intellectual property as it is for real property, and the protection afforded consequently similar in principle,
If you want a right to something someone else has created, then trading value for value as honest citizens do is a better method than using sophistry and theft, as politicians and some philosophy students do.
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