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Against Monopoly
[From Mises blog, Dec. 7, 2007]
I received an impressive inquiry from a high school senior: “I am contacting you to ask if I can interview you for my senior project paper, which is a persuasive paper about why copyrights are invalid and impractical. I will have between 5-10 questions regarding intellectual property for you to answer.” I said sure; and she sent on her questions, which were:
1. What would you say is the most powerful argument against copyrights and patents?
2. What would you respond with to someone who argues that resources do not have to be finite or scarce in order to be allocated as property?
3. How would you respond to Lysander Spooner’s argument that property is wealth that is owned, and wealth includes ideas since they can be manifested into tangible wealth?
4. What about the argument that people own their minds, so they own the mental products?
5. Some anti-IP people believe in a right to first sell. Would you say that the original creators should have a right to sell the creation first? Why or why not?
6. What would you respond to someone who claims that if there were copies all around, the original inventor wouldn’t get as much profit as he should have?
My replies are below.
Question 1. What would you say is the most powerful argument against copyrights and patents?
As I elaborate in In Defense of Napster and Against the Second Homesteading Rule and Against Intellectual Property (both available here), humans need to use scarce or “rivalrous” resources — for example, tangible things like land or food or clothing — to survive. The nature of these things is that only one person can use or control the resource. Thus, there is a possibility of conflict over the use of these things. For people to live peacefully and productively in the world, we need to be able to find ways to use scarce resources without fighting over them. This means that each scarce good–each thing that might be the subject of conflict–is assigned one unique owner, someone with the exclusive right to control that resource. The rules for determining who is the owner have to be objective, fair, and just, in order to be generally accepted and serve the function of reducing conflict. It is for this reason that ownership is thus assigned to the person with the best claim to the thing in question–the most objective “link” to it. This is the libertarian-Lockean idea of “first use”–whoever first possesses or uses a thing–that is, establishes objective property “borders” with respect to the resource–is the owner. Any other rule is non-objective or arbitrary. For example, if the first user did not have the best claim to the resource, then whatever rule you use to assign property rights, property is not secure because some latecomer could just take it from the current owner. So any property assignment rule at all presupposes the first-user idea–the idea that an earlier user, ceteris paribus, has a better claim than any other user. Which implies the first user — the homesteader — has the best claim of all. Any other rule in effect violates the notion that latecomers have an inferior claim to earlier users. For example, a thief who steals property is in effect a latecomer. And mere …