There is no such thing as ‘Intellectual Property’, it’s a politically contrived concept meant to provide legal economic privilege for some at the expense of others – as is the case with all political economic intervention.
IP is the concept that physical property represents ideas and those ideas are also property and they deserve protection under the law. It’s the concept that ideas, people’s thoughts, can be ‘stolen’ and stealing is illegal. How is this strangely magical connection made between a physical product and someone’s ideas? Is it assumed that some of us are witches and warlocks and can read people’s minds and steal their thoughts for ourselves?
What is stealing? Stealing is taking something that doesn’t belong to you without the owner’s permission and the owner no longer has that thing because you took it. To steal ideas and thoughts would mean the ability to not only read someone’s mind but also to delete those ideas and thoughts from them so they no longer have them. Obviously, IP must be based in the dark arts.
IP is so perverted, the concept of stealing must be redefined in order for it to be legally implemented. When real property, like a car or wallet, is stolen the act of stealing ensures the owner no longer has the item, otherwise it wasn’t stolen. Only in the fantastical, mystical world of IP can something be stolen and both the owner and thief be in possession of it at the same time.
Regardless how uncomfortable, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth. So let’s assume that it’s not some sinister voodoo at play and remove mind control from the analysis and we are left with the truth that people can’t steal ideas and thoughts. It’s embarrassing that this needs to be pointed out but politics is for the infantile and the insane and IP is political so the nonsense makes sense.
So, if people can’t steal the ideas of others, what does IP actually do? IP is the fraudulent idea that if you produce a product and receive IP rights from the government for that product, nobody else can legally produce that product or something similar without paying you for the permission to do so. It creates legal barriers to entry and competition. Any such economic impediments lead to an inefficient allocation of resources, less innovation and invention and a monopoly position for the holder of the IP rights. In other words, one person benefits economically at the expense of everyone else.
The argument in favor of IP is always the same: ‘How can I profit from my idea if anyone is free to copy it?’. First of all, since we’ve established people can’t read minds, if you don’t want your idea copied, don’t put it in the public domain and certainly don’t sell the product of your idea. Once you sell a good though, it belongs to the buyer and he can do anything he wants with it including copy it. Secondly, this argument implies that any product that is profitable must enjoy IP rights and we know that’s not the case. Most products on the market are not patent or copyright protected, so how do those producers profit? By continuous innovation and invention, by building a better mousetrap, by providing a quality product at a price consumers can afford. In short, by continuously working at it. IP laws relieve producers of such proletariat responsibilities and allow them to profit from legal protections like royalty. In fact, that’s what paying an IP holder to produce or use his product is called: a royalty.
Like all political programs, IP laws get abused. There are attorneys who do nothing other than go around buying up patents and copyrights and then look for potential violations so they can sue for infringement. Nothing is produced, there is no innovation, no invention just a legal privilege being passed around for profit. IP laws are just another way politicians have found to legally redistribute wealth to a favored legal class, another economic perversion.