I’m having trouble with this: if we protect real physical property, why shouldn’t we protect intellectual property?
If we protect the right of someone to own a house after he acquires it from the sweat of his brow, why should we protect the right of a writer to keep his book after he puts in the time for writing it, or a musician who writes a song?
Suppose the idea for an invention is released to the public, obviously there will be more competition on the part of the manufacturers and the consumers win, but what insentive is in it for anyone who has an idea if that idea is just going to be publicized anyway?
Keep in mind, I’m a beginner at this, and no, I haven’t read Stephen Kinsella’s “Against Intellectual Property” yet, but I will.
You are wearing a shirt right now. It’s simply impossible for two people to wear that one shirt together. So anybody would refer to it as “your” shirt. And this is understood only by basic human understanding.
Property is just a statement of fact. It’s not the same with an idea, which you can’t call property, because you can’t claim it. That’s all.
Patents are just an excuse for lawsuits, and my father who worked in telecom and software sector can confirm it. Ideas are not a tool of economic decision-making; the means by which you implement an idea are (capital, prices,.etc).
Main problem with IP is that it prohibits using your own property, you won’t have full control of your stuff (so to speak), so a complete stranger can exclude you from using your own property, and that is not only bizarre, but ridiculous.
To enable IP, you have to “rewrite” all property rights, and finally it becomes, that IP trumps physical property, even though IP is not scarce. You have to create artificial scarcity.
In short, you can’t protect IP without infringing somone else’s property rights. There is a partial solution, known as “contracts”, but I am skeptical about them too.