AGAINST INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROPERTY RIGHTS: TANGIBLE AND INTANGIBLE

All libertarians favor property rights, and agree that property rights include rights in tangible resources. These resources include immovables (realty) such as land and houses, and movables such as chairs, clubs, cars, and clocks.¹

Further, all libertarians support rights in one’s own body. Such rights may be called “self-ownership” as long as one keeps in mind that there is dispute about whether such body-ownership is alienable in the same way that rights in homesteadable, external objects are alienable.² In any event, libertarians universally hold that all tangible scarce resources—whether homesteadable or created, immovable or movable, or our very bodies—are subject to rightful control, or “ownership,” by specified individuals.

As we move away from the tangible (corporeal) toward the intangible, matters become fuzzier. Rights to reputations (defamation laws) and against blackmail, for example, are rights in very intangible types of things. Most, though not all, libertarians oppose laws against blackmail, and many oppose the idea of a right to one’s reputation.³

Also disputed is the concept of intellectual property (herein referred to as IP). Are there individual rights to one’s intellectual creations, such as inventions or written works? Should the legal system protect such rights? Below, I summarize current U.S. law on intellectual property rights. I then survey various libertarian views on IP rights, and present what I consider to be the proper view.