Some propositions on property rights – and IP

There’s been a lot of recent discussions around the traps questioning the legitimacy of intellectual property, much of it based on what I would characterise as based on a complete misunderstanding of the basis of property rights per se.  And not just the basis of property rights—and not just misunderstanding: today’s “libertarian” attackers of intellectual property appear completely ignorant of the arguments and justification for individual rights in general—and unwilling to understand them.  And further, they specifically target Objectivists’ understanding of intellectual property, but evince no sign they’re even aware of Objectivist arguments, and offer no evidence of any familiarity with them.

It’s almost like they figure a full understanding will undercut their arguments—or preclude their wish to steal other’s intellectual property.

Objectivist Greg Perkins has a fantastic article defending intellectual property that I once again thoroughly recommend:

Don't steal this article - Greg Perkins, Noodle Food

That article itself however rests on those very ideas that the “libertarian” opponents of intellectual property fail to understand, or to address-or even to look like they want to.

I don’t propose to give the full Objectivist account of property rights here—not in a simple blog post.  (Well, what began as a simple blog post.)  What I propose instead is to offer some of those basic propositions about property rights you should have under your belt before you wrestle with the “libertarian” arguments against intellectual property—propositions that when integrated will help indicate why property rights are right, and by extension why today’s momentarily fashionable arguments against intellectual property fall so wide of the mark (and in my view take advantage of people’s ignorance of many of these more fundamental points).

These points, in essence, are the lines of argument that today’s “libertarian” opponents of intellectual property wish to ignore.  As Greg Perkins says in his article:

    “What is particularly striking is that none of the contemporary [anti-intellectual] heavyweights like [Tom] Palmer and [Stephen] Kinsella grapple with the meaning of individual rights in general, nor their still-deeper basis in ethics, epistemology, and human nature. [Even] their chief observation begs the question: is the splendid characteristic of conflict-prevention the central purpose of property rights, or merely a benefit -- is it the cause or an effect? To determine this, we need to investigate the source of rights in general. These scholars seem hesitant to do so, but Ayn Rand wasn't, and her perspective illuminates the central difficulty in their case: they have missed the essence of all rights.”

Rights are right.

Individual rights are ultimately based on the needs of man’s life—they frame the “moral space” within which we can take the actions as of right that are necessary to sustain our life.  Unlike other animals we cannot survive as we come into the world; in order to stay alive and to flourish we each need to produce and to keep the fruits of our production. If our minds are our means of survival – as Julian Simon used to say, our Ultimate Resource – then property is the result of applying the creative potential of our minds to reality in order to enhance our lives.

Other animals survive by acting automatically, instinctively; man survives by using his mind. Animals survive by repeating their actions of the past, by doing what worked yesterday; man survives by by looking towards the future, by using reason.

The protection of individual rights makes the world safe for reason. 

    “The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.
    “The Declaration of Independence stated that men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind—a rational being—that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.
    “The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.”
                           - Ayn Rand, ‘Man’s Rights,’ in The Virtue of Selfishness

     “The influence of reason shows up in the development of the individual’s conceptual ability to give a sense of present reality to his life in decades to come, and in his identification of himself as a self-responsible causal agent with the power to improve his life. This combination of ideas is what produced in people such attitudes as the realization that hard work pays and that they must accept responsibility for their future by means of saving. The same combination of ideas helped to provide the intellectual foundation for the establishment and extension of private property rights as incentives to production and saving. Private property rights rest on the recognition of the principle of causality in the form that those who are to implement the causes must be motivated by being able to benefit from the effects they create. They also rest on a foundation of secularism—of the recognition of the rightness of being concerned with material improvement.”
                          - George Reisman,
                            ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Capitalism and Economic Activity,’ in         Capitalism

    “Man is creative only in thinking and in the realm of imagination. In the world of external phenomena he is only a transformer. . . Only the human mind that directs action and production is creative. . . Production is not something physical, material and external; it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon. Its essential requisites are not human labor and external natural forces and things, but the decision of the mind to use these factors as means for the attainment of ends.  What produces the product are not toil and trouble in themselves, but the fact that the toiling is guided by reason.”
                           - Ludwig von Mises, ‘Production,’ in Human Action

     “Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.”
                           - Ayn Rand, ‘Patents and Copyrights,’ in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Property rights are the fundamental right.

    “They who have no property can have no freedom.”
                            - Stephen Hopkins

    “The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to life is their only implementation.  Without property rights no other rights are possible.”
                           - Ayn Rand, ‘Man’s Rights’

    “Man has to work and produce in order to support his life. He has to support his life by his own effort and by the guidance of his own mind. If he cannot dispose of the product of his effort, he cannot dispose of his effort; if he cannot dispose of his effort, he cannot dispose of his life. Without property rights, no other rights can be practiced.”
                           - Ayn Rand, ‘What is Capitalism’

    “Recognizing the right to bodily sanctity while denying the righ tto act to maintain one’s life would be pointless.  This is because life is sustainable only through action.  (Indeed, life is action.) [There is] as an analogous observation: the right to act to maintain one’s life should protect the goods obtained in the course of doing that.  The reasoning is that sustenance of life requires the production and consumption of goods.  If the food that a farmer produced were not morally secure from any raider’s plundering, how could she be expected to live. . .
    “Since material goods keep people alive, individuals must be entitled to control the use of the goods that they produce.  Without this, the right to life and the freedom would be empty; they would no longer serve rights’ telos.  Shylock captures this thought in The Merchant of Venice: ‘You take my house, when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house; you take my life, When you do take the means whereby I live.
    “The right to property is the means whereby we live.”
                            - Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom

    “Where there is no private ownership, individuals can be bent to the will of the state, under threat of starvation.” 
                           - attrib. to Leon Trotsky 
                            (quoted in Tom Bethell’s
                                            The Noblest Triumph: Property & Prosperity Through the Ages)

      “All civilizations have up to now been based on private ownership of the means of production. In the past civilization and private property have been linked together. . . If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.”
                           - Ludwig von Mises, ‘Capitalism,’ in Human Action

Property is a relationship

It’s important to remember that property cannot simply be equated with objects. More accurately, property refers to a relationship—something tangible (or intangible) in which we have property.  “As long as this is understood, we may use the term ‘property’ to refer either to the object owned or the relationship of ownership.” [Tara Smith.] It’s more accurate, strictly speaking, to say we have “property in” this or that than it is to say that this or that is property.

    “We frequently speak as if property denotes goods that a person owns. (‘Leave that alone, it’s my property.’)  Yet property does not refer to objects per se.  For an object is just that. . . An object qualifies as property only insofar as it stands in a certain relationship to some person.”
                            - Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom

    “A man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”
                            - James Madison

   “Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.”
                           - Ayn Rand, ‘Man’s Rights’

Property must be created

The stuff that sustains human life has to be created--property has to be created--wealth has to be created.  All the wealth in the world that now exists in the world had to be created.  The very act of creating new wealth brings it into a property relationship with the creator. 

When we create new wealth, we create new values. Those new values have an owner.

    “Individuals do not possess property rights simply because material goods are part of what life requires.  The other essential leg of the case stems from the origin of goods’ value.”
                            - Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom

    “The source of the goods-character of things is ultimately within us. Goods derive their character as goods by virtue of their ability to benefit human beings.”
                         - George Reisman, ‘Wealth & Goods,’ in Capitalism

    “The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power—and it is the only meaning of the concept ‘creative.’ ‘Creation’ does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. ‘Creation’ means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before.”
                            - Ayn Rand, ‘The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made’

    “It was once customary to distinguish between the production of tangible goods and the rendering of personal services. The carpenter who made tables and chairs was called productive; but this epithet was denied to the doctor whose advice helped the ailing carpenter to recover his capacity to make tables and chairs. A differentiation was made between the doctor-carpenter nexus and the carpenter-tailor nexus. The doctor, it was asserted, does not himself produce; he makes a living from what other people produce, he is maintained by carpenters and tailors. At a still earlier date the French Physiocrats contended that all labor was sterile unless it extracted something from the soil. Only cultivation, fishing and hunting, and the working of mines and quarries were in their opinion productive. The processing industries did not add to the value of the material employed anything more than the value of the things consumed by the workers.
    Present-day economists laugh at their predecessors for having made such untenable distinctions. However, they should rather cast the beam out of their own eyes. The way in which many contemporary writers deal with various problems—for instance, advertising and marketing—is manifestly a relapse into the crude errors which should have disappeared long ago.”
                            - Ludwig von Mises, ‘Production,’ in Human Action

    “We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.” [Emphasis added.]
                              - Ayn Rand, ‘The Soul of an Individualist,’ in For the New Intellectual

    “Wealth is the result of human labor. Labor is the means by which man’s mind transmits his designs and purposes to matter. It is man’s application of his bodily and mental faculties for the purpose of altering matter in form or location and thereby making the matter thus altered serve a further purpose. . .
    “The physical matter of which natural resources a composed is, of course, not made by man—it is nature-given. Nevertheless, the wealth-character of natural resources is man-made: it is the result of human labor.  It is the result of the labor that discovers the uses to which the natural resources can be put, and of the labor that enable them to become accessible in ways that they can be used gainfully. Thus, it is labor [mainly of an intellectual character] that establishes the character of natural resources as goods, and thus as wealth.”
                         - George Reisman, ‘Wealth & Labor,’ Capitalism

    “Things that can be placed in a causal connection with the satisfaction of human needs we term useful things [“Nützlichkeiten”]. If, however, we both recognize this causal connection, and have the power actually to direct the useful things to the satisfaction of our needs, we call them goods.
     “If a thing is to become a good, or in other words, if it is to acquire goods-character, all four of the following prerequisites must be simultaneously present:
     1. A human need.
     2. Such properties as render the thing capable of being brought into a causal connection with the satisfaction of this need.
     3. Human knowledge of this causal connection.
     4. Command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need.
     “Only when all four of these prerequisites are present simultaneously can a thing become a good.”
                          - Carl Menger, ‘The General Theory of The Good,’ Principles of Economics

Mixing labour? Or rewarding good judgement.

The most well-known justification hitherto for property rights was put forward by John Locke, whose brilliant analysis of how property rights are applied is somewhat undercut by his flawed argument for their justification.  Tibor Machan explains the flaw, and indicates that the fundamental justification for property rights is an entrepreneurial one--it is not based on a “labour theory of value,” where labour is identified only on its purely physical component, but on the crucially important identification of the role of the mind in production. It’s in this sense that we can understand the saying that “all property is intellectual property.”

    “John Locke advanced the theory that when one mixes one’s labor with nature, one gains ownership of that part of nature with which the labor is mixed. Thus, for example, if I gather wood from the forest for a fire, or for materials to build a shelter, I have a ‘natural right’ to what I have gathered, inasmuch as I have ‘mixed my labor’ with it and to that extent put some of myself into it. Since I have a self-evident right to my own body, including my labor, that part of nature that includes myself (i.e., my labor) is also mine. Though Locke held that nature is initially a gift from God to us all, he argued that once we individually mix our labor with some portion of it, it becomes ours alone.
    “This idea, though perhaps commonsensically compelling when limited to simple examples of physical labor such as gathering wood, has not carried wide conviction, mainly because the idea of ‘mixing labor with nature’ is too vague. Does discovering an island count as an act of labor—never mind ‘mixing’ one’s labor? Does exploring the island? Fencing it in? Does identifying (discovering) a scientific truth count as mixing labor with nature? What about inventing a new device based on scientific information available to all? Or trade—should the act of coming to an agreement count as mixing one’s labor with something of value? Challenging examples to Locke’s principle abound.
    “A revised Lockean notion has been advanced in current libertarian thought by way of a theory of entrepreneurship, an idea advanced at about the same time by philosopher James Sadowsky of Fordham University and by economist Israel Kirzner of New York University. The novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, perhaps the modern era’s most fervent advocate of capitalism based on a theory of the inalienable individual right to life, liberty, and property, also emphasized the moral role of individual judgment and initiative or entrepreneurship.
    “According to the entrepreneurial model, it is the judgment—no small matter in human affairs where instincts play hardly any role—that fixes something as possessing (potential) value (to oneself or others); and therefore the making of this judgment and acting on it—the alertness and attentiveness of it all—is what earns oneself the status of a property holder. The rational process of forming a judgment is neither automatic nor passive; neither does the process involve more than a minimum overt physical effort, but it is an act of labor nonetheless. What gives the judgment its moral significance is that it is a freely made, initiated choice involving the unique human capacity to reason things out, applied to some aspect of reality and its relationship to one’s purposes and life goals. One exerts the effort to choose to identify something as having potential or actual value. This imparts to it a practical dimension, something to guide one’s actions in life. Whether one is correct or not in any given instance remains to be seen, but in either case the judgment brings the item under one’s jurisdiction on something like a “first come, first served” basis.
    “For example, assume that George identifies some portion of unowned land as being of potential value. Having made this judgment, George now has rightful jurisdiction over the property, so that others may not (rightfully) prevent him from exploring it for oil or minerals, or simply using it to build a museum or a private home. His judgment may have been in error: the land may turn out to be infertile or otherwise unsuitable for his purposes. Even so, given that people require for their lives a sphere of jurisdiction, by having first made and acted upon the decision to select the land, he has appropriated it in a way that cannot be objectionable—indeed, is a prudent effort, at least.”
                     - Tibor Machan, ‘The Right to Private Property’

Property creates new value

Ultimately, what we’re creating with our good judgement is new values.  By identifying and rearranging what nature has given use, we raise materials from a lower value (in relation to us) to a higher value (in relation to us); they move from being materials to being resources; from being things things to being goods. It is their creation as new goods that is the economic component. It is their creation as new values that is the moral component.

    “Consider those things that people hold as property.  What makes the possession of these things desirable is that they serve human purposes. . .  All the things that individuals own … are valuable insofar as they contribute to the fulfillment of some purpose. . .
    “The point is, the goods that individuals own are valuable because of individuals’ efforts. [Individuals had to figure out, for example, that coal could be burnt to produce energy, how it might do so, what ends this might accomplish, and then proceed to locate, extract, transport, and burn coal under suitable conditions to serve those ends. Individuals had to figure out that rubber could be converted into tires, how to do so, why that might be useful, and proceed to harvest and treat the rubber in order to make it serve that function.] These goods are not intrinsically valuable.  Their value is not buried within them, like gifts in boxes, simply awaiting our discovery.  Things’ desirability does not precede individuals’ molding resources to accomplish various purposes.  It is individuals’ deliberate employment of materials to serve certain needs that supplies things’ value.  Before that human contribution, naturally available resources hold merely the potential to be of value to people, if they are tapped in appropriate ways.
    “The relevance of all this to the defence of property rights is straightforward.  If objects’ value is the result of individual efforts, them objects are valuable only because particular individuals have worked in constructive ways to make things serve some ends.  When this realization is teamed with the egoistic premise that a person is entitled to live for her own benefit, it becomes clear that the value a person creates should be hers to keep and control. 
    “Since human effort creates the value that any object possesses—since individuals are responsible for all of a thing’s value—it is appropriate to recognise property rights belonging to the individuals who generate the relevant value.  If a person is entitled to act to promote her own eudaimonia and through her actions creates something that is valuable to her, we have no grounds for denying her right to that product.”
                            - Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom

The general benefit from private ownership of the means of production

So property rights are inherently bound up with production.  Indeed, they are essential to the human method of production: which is his mind.

"Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes—which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification—which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels—-what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discovered how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor? That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets—-what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through all the ages?"
                        - Ayn Rand, ‘The Nature of an Artist,’ For the New Intellectual

But it is not just the owners of the means of production who enjoy the benefits . . .

    “Private ownership in the means of production serves equally the interests of owners and non-owners.”
                         - Ludwig von Mises, ‘The Forms of Class War,’ in Socialism

   “The advantages of private ownership of the means of production are so overwhelming that it is actually of secondary importance precisely who the initial private owners are and how their ownership is established.  Whatever the specific method or methods of establishing private ownership of the means of production, the institution will function to the benefit of everyone—owners of the means of production and non-owners of the means of production alike.  It will do so, however, only to the degree that the individual private owners possess full and secure rights of ownership.
                         - George Reisman, ‘The Tyranny of Socialism,’ in Capitalism

    “To have production goods in the economic sense, i.e., to make them serve one’s economic purposes, it is not necessary to have them physically in the way that one has consumption goods . . . To drink coffee I do not need to own a coffee plantation in Brazil, an ocean steamer, and a coffee roasting plant, though all these means of production must be used to bring coffee to my table.  Sufficient that others own these means of production and employ them for me.”
                         - Ludwig von Mises, ‘The Nature of Ownership,’ in Socialism

    “The influence of the division of labor on the institution of private property of the means of production is almost universally ignored.  Typically, people think of privately owned means of production in terms that would be appropriate only in a non-division-of-labor society. That is, they think of them in the same way that they think of privately owned consumer goods—namely, as being of benefit only to their owners.  They believe that before the non-owners can benefit from the means of production they must first become owners. . . .
    “The first thing that must be realized is that in a division-of-labor society, all private property that is in the form of means of production—i.e., of capital—serves everyone, non-owners as well as owners. In a division-of-labor society, the means of production are not used in producing for their owners’ p[personal consumption, but for the market. . .  The physical beneficiary of this private property—and it is the far greater part of the capitalists’ wealth—are all those who buy the products it helps to produce.  In other words, it is the general buying public who are the physical beneficiaries of the capitalists’ capital. . .
    “It cannot be stressed too strongly: the simple fact is that in a division-of-labor society, one does not have to own the means of production in order to get their benefit. One only has to buy the products. . .”
    “There is a conclusion that follows from this which will appear highly paradoxical to many people, because it totally contradicts all they have been mistakenly led to believe—by the educational system, by the media, and by out culture in general—but which is nonetheless perfectly logical and correct.  That is, the more the private property rights of capitalists are respected, the greater are the benefits to non-capitalists. Because to the extent that their rights are respected, the capitalists are encouraged to save and accumulate capital. . .  Also, of course, the more the property rights of the capitalists are respected, the more powerfully do eth incentives of profit and loss operate to make the capitalists satisfy the demand of the consumers . . .”
                         - George Reisman, ‘Private Ownership of the Means of Production,’ in Capitalism

“If that which one buys with formal purchase is one’s own,
If usage confers title to things, as the lawyers maintain;
The the farm which feeds you is yours; and the farmer,
when he cultivates the field which soon gives you grain, feels you are his master.
You pay your money: you get in return grapes, chickens, eggs, a jar of wine.”
- Horace, 2. Epistol., 2, 158-163 [quoted in L. von Mises, Socialism]

Does the argument for property rights rest on the “scarcity” of natural resources ands tangible goods?

According to today’s “libertarian” attackers, the argument for property rights rests on scarcity. “Let us take a step back and look afresh at the idea of property rights,” begins Stephen Kinsella in one of his many diatribes against intellectual property. “Libertarians believe in property rights in tangible goods (resources). Why? What is it about tangible goods that makes them subjects for property rights? Why are tangible goods property?  A little reflection,” which is all apparently that Mr Kinsella can manage, “will show that it is these goods' scarcity -- the fact that there can be conflict over these goods by multiple human actors. The very possibility of conflict over a resource renders it scarce, giving rise to the need for ethical rules to govern its use. Thus, the fundamental social and ethical function of property rights is to prevent interpersonal conflict over scarce resources. ...”

But as we’ve already seen, that is not at all the fundamental social and ethical function of property rights. 

    “Contrary to the view of ‘libertarians’ opposed to intellectual property, the essential basis of property is not scarcity—it is production.  The complaint that intellectual property is an oxymoron because ideas are not scarce in the same way as apples has no merit, for the concepts of property and ownership lie fundamentally in the need for man to produce and enjoy values in support of their lives—not merely in the narrower and subsidiary need to avoid conflict with one another in that enjoyment.”
                           - Greg Perkins, ‘Don't steal this article,’ Noodle Food

And as George Reisman explains, “the problem of natural resources is in no sense one of intrinsic scarcity.”

    “The problem of natural resources is in no sense one of intrinsic scarcity. From a strictly physical-chemical point of view, natural resources are one and the same with the supply of matter and energy that exists in the world and, indeed, in the universe. Technically, this supply may be described as finite, but for all practical purposes it is infinite. It does not constitute the slightest obstacle to economic activity—there is nothing we are prevented from doing because the earth (let alone the universe) is in danger of running out of some chemical element or other, or of energy.
    “The problem of natural resources is strictly one of useability, accessibility, and economy. That is, man needs to know what the different elements and combinations of elements nature provides are good for, and then to be able actually to get at them and direct them to the satisfaction of his needs without having to expend an inordinate amount of labor to do so. Clearly, the only effective limit on the supply of such economically useable natural resources— that is, natural resources in the sense in which they constitute wealth—is the state of scientific and technological knowledge and the quantity and quality of capital equipment available. Because the supply of resources provided by nature is one and the same with the supply of matter and energy, the supply of economically useable natural resources is capable of virtually limitless increase. It increases as man expands his knowledge of and physical power over the world and universe. . .
    “The essential principle pertaining to natural resources can be summarized as follows.  What nature provides is a supply of matter and energy that for all practical purposes is infinite.  Yet at the same time, nature does not provide a single particle of natural resources in the form of wealth.  The bestowal of the character of economic goods and wealth on what nature provides is the work of human intelligence.  An essential economic task of man is progressively to apply his intelligence to achieve a growing understanding of nature and to build progressively more powerful forms of capital equipment that give him growing physical mastery over nature."  [His italics removed, mine added.]
                         - George Reisman, ‘The Limitless Potential of Natural Resources,’ in Capitalism

    “Contrary to the ‘argument from scarcity,’ if you want to make a ‘limited’ resource available to the whole people, make it private property and throw it on a free, open market.
    “The ‘argument from scarcity,’ incidentally, is outdated even in its literal meaning . . .”
                         - Ayn Rand, ‘The Property Status of Airwaves,’ in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Does the protection of property rights grant a so called “monopoly right”?

It’s said that the protection of intellectual property is somehow the protection of a monopoly.  It is not, and more than the protection of any other legitimate property right represents the protection of a so-called monopoly.  Their protection is simply the protection of what is right.

    “Individuals may help themselves to unowned materials. A person need not receive permission from anyone else in order to be entitled to take or use an unowned object.  Recognising something as a person’s property, however, removes it from the field available for anyone’s use. . . Like all rights, property rights entail obligations on others. Once an object becomes one person’s property, others may no longer use it without the owner’s permission.”
                      - Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom

    “Patents on new inventions, copyrights on books, drawings, musical compositions, and the like, and trademarks and brandnames, do not constitute monopolies.  True enough, they reserve markets, or parts of markets, to the exclusive possession of the owners of  the patents or copyrights, or trademarks or brandnames, and they do so by means of the use of [the government’s] physical force inasmuch as it is against the law to infringe on these rights.
    “None of these rights represent monopoly, however, because none of them is supported by the initiation of physical force.  In all of these cases, the government stands ready to use physical force in defence of a pre-existing property right established either by an act of personal creation or by the fact of distinct identity.. .
    “The fact that the government is ready to use force to protect patents and copyrights is fully as proper as that it stands ready to use force to protect farmers and businessmen in their ownership of their physical products [or once used to] and to come to their rescue when they are set upon by trespassers or attacked by robbers [or once used to].”
                      - George Reisman, ‘Patents and Copyrights, Trademarks and Brandnames, Not Monopolies,’ in Capitalism

    “Congress, treatise authors, courts and scholars [now] agree that patents are a unique form of property that secures only a negative right to exclude others from an invention. . . The conventional wisdom is that … patents secure only a right to exclude . . . 
    “This claim is profoundly mistaken. For much of its history, a patent was defined by Congress and courts in the same conceptual terms as property in land and chattels, as securing the exclusive rights of possession, use and disposition.”
                     - Adam Mossoff, ‘Patents as Property: Conceptualizing the Exclusive Right(s) in Patent Law’

   “The great chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.” 
                     -John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

    “The existence of patents and copyrights, and trademarks and brandnames, like all other protection of property rights, serves to increase the supply of goods and service—by making it possible for those who are the cause of the increase to benefit from the improvements they make.  It thus serves to reduce prices and to increase everyone's buying power as time goes on. [What patents and copyrights protect comes under the heading of something new that is more efficient: namely new more efficient methods of satisfied in other ways, by different goods. . . Even if the price does not drop at all for the time being, the reinvestment of profits made by virtue of the cost-cutting improvement will operate to increase production and reduce prices somewhere else in the economic system.]
    “Contrary to [the case with] monopoly, patents and copyrights, and trademarks and brandnames operate to increase supplies and reduce prices, while their abolition would result in the opposite.  Indeed their existence must be considered a requirement of the freedom of competition, and their abolition as constituting the establishment of monopoly!  Their existence upholds the fundamental freedom of individuals to be secure in their property and to compete on that basis.  TGheir abolition would reserve markets to the dull and incompetent by means of the the initiation of force against the intellectual property of those who had new ideas and something better to offer.  Their abolition would thus serve to establish the monopoly of the dull and incompetent by forcibly depriving the intelligent and competent of the benefit of their intelligence and competence, and thereby forcibly excluding them from the market.”
                       - George Reisman, ‘Patents and Copyrights, Trademarks and Brandnames, Not Monopolies,’ in Capitalism

Am I the only one who enjoys the picture of Mr Kinsella and his colleagues being the standard-bearer of the dull and incompetent? In this context, no more appropriate image could be imagined.

Would taking intellectual property lead to prosperity?

Ludwig von Mises -- whose name is borne by the Institute at which Mr Kinsella has smeared most of his diatribes in favour of parasitism and free downloads –- was himself a strong exponent of the protection of intellectual property. “With the abolition of patents and copyrights,” he pointed out, “authors of inventors would for the most part be producers of external economies.” (By which he means that the gains, benefits and other advantages of their work would go to others – i.e., to the dull and the incompetent and the lumpenly ignorant.  Or as Mises’s bibliographer Bettina Bien Greaves summarises: “Without copyright protection, musicians, authors, and composers are in the position of having to bear all the costs of production while the benefits go to others.”) 

As George Reisman explains above, following von Mises, the taking or abolition of intellectual property would lead to “a monopoly of the dull and incompetent,” and with it a diminution of supply and and rise in prices.  He goes further.

    “It is true that at any given time, taking for granted the existence of the most recent batch of improvements, introduced in the expectation that hose responsible would benefit from them, it might be possible to achieve a temporary acceleration in the increase in the supply of goods and services by abolishing patents and copyrights. Such a temporary increase would be comparable in its ultimate significance to the abolition of the property rights of any other group of producers, such as storekeepers and manufacturers, and allowing mobs to sack their stores and warehouses.  A very short-lived gain would be followed by a permanent loss of future supplies—in this case, further new inventions and new ideas.”
                      - George Reisman, ‘Patents and Copyrights, Trademarks and Brandnames, Not Monopolies,’ in Capitalism

And now?

And now, once you’ve integrated all you’ve read here (sometime next week or so) you’ll be ready to read Greg Perkins article again and do it proper justice:

‘Don't steal this article’ - Greg Perkins, Noodle Food.

Enjoy!

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