Intellectual Property (IP) is still defended by quite a few libertarians, but most of them either by default support it or they do not understand libertarian principles, e.g. body-ownership. It's very easy to see why IP is unjustifiable, despite the great amount of arguments for IP. It fails to be compatible with even the most basic libertarian rule: body-ownership. This is a short post (no where near exhaustive), but it deals away with IP swiftly.
As Hoppe, Kinsella, and I have shown, the body-ownership principle, i.e. "self"-ownership principle, is a priori true. It can only be denied with performative contradiction. The body-ownership principle implies the "objective link" rule; the rule is that for some specific person to own a specific scarce resource there must be an objective, "intersubjectively ascertainable" link between the two. For one's body it is the direct use of it, and for external scarce resources it is original appropriation.
There is no such objective link that ties an inventor in NYC to some other guy's identical machine in D.C. It is simply an arbitrary link. Rather, the inventor simply says he has property rights in all machines identical to the one he created. As such, IP fails to be compatible with the body-ownership principle, and is thus invalid.
I will eventually make a bigger post about IP.
I am Nick Sinard, an amateur economist and philosopher that follows in the rationalist tradition, specifically the Mises-Rothbard-Hoppe tradition. You can find my material at www.NickSinard.com and www.Facebook.com/TheNickSinard . I'll soon be putting up videos on YouTube about an array of topics, including "What is libertarianism?" You can find my YT channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFGA8_Ti30AbYiADPCo8Qgw
A good, quick explanation; nice mention of argumentation ethics too!
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Thank you.
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Do you think IP rights could work with some kind of exception for independent people who coincidentally happen to invent similar things?
If I'm a big corporation, I see your small company's great idea in the market, and I copy it and undersell you to drive you out of business and steal your market share, you ought to be able to sue me.
But if I'm some dude on the opposite coast who comes up with a similar idea, and I can show documentation of my own independent invention process with notes and prototypes or whatever evidence some court might require to prove that I didn't copy or steal someone else's idea, it would be a shame if I got shut down with a lawsuit. Maybe some middle ground, like what they do with preset copyright royalties for music, ought to exist in that case.
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No, I think in every single case IP is unjustifiable. Stephan Kinsella lays out the case here https://mises.org/library/case-against-ip-concise-guide
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This is one of those situations where it's academically interesting to ponder libertarian philosophy, but in the real world, if I could buy one copy of your book, make a million copies of it, and sell it to everybody, so that you didn't make a cent, nobody would be an author. There would be big companies, and even bot programs, out there pretty much copying everything that ever gets published.
Every single thing that ever got invented would be invented by Google or Costco. Because Joe Normalguy would have zero incentive to ever start a business or come up with any new products or ways of doing things. He might as well just get a job at Google or Costco. Because the second Joe tries to make something new, if it's the least bit commercially successful, Google will steal it, make it faster/cheaper/better, and Joe won't make a cent.
It's one thing to say that some IP owner shouldn't have the right to stop you from reconfiguring your own slinky, which you own, for personal use, in a way that would infringe a patent. But surely he should have the right to stop Google from seeing how well his product is selling, copying it, and driving him out of business. Otherwise, nobody bothers inventing reconfigured slinkies because coming up with new ways of doing stuff is just a waste of time and money.
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