I was recently reading George Hotz’s recent blog post from February 19th called Nobody Profits, linked here.
His ideas are perfectly sound. I mean there is no intellectual property in the way that there is regular property. If you steal something from an individual that is physical, they no longer have that thing. But one can always have an idea.
The fundamental thing he does not address but is central to his argument is that ideas are not scarce. What makes something scarce is that there’s not enough of it to satisfy as many people who would want it if it were free. The study of economics is the study of scarcity and the study of economics says that we need property to solve this. However, if ideas are not scarce, then they do not need to be property.
But for a moment, bear with me, I’m going to give the alternate perspective. George is dealing with in metaphysics and as realists, we don’t deal in metaphysics. Ideas are not scarce naturally in an anarchic world, obviously. However, in the real world one can make them scarce. One can make them scarce by saying I’ll shoot you if you copy an idea. So, use of that idea is now scarce. Is that advantageous sometimes? Yes, it is. Does this reduce competition? Yes, indeed.
It is a fundamental choice that a person with military power makes in order to encourage certain behavior out of their subjects. If there was no intellectual property, anyone would be able to make a Harry Potter movie. This in some ways is a great thing. There would be a competition between Harry Potter movies. We’d probably have a better Harry Potter movie because there would be so many.
On the other hand, isn’t there something special if it’s just one? If there’s continuity, there is a canon. This does not mean you can’t be inspired by Harry Potter and create something similar. We have intellectual property laws and this in not the case. The rules of your of what exactly you make scarce is up to the facilitator but for a given canon it may be helpful to have this continuity.
In this trying time, do the people need a guiding light, a controlled canon to look at, to give them hope, to give them guidance to where they need to be? This is for the father of the people to decide. There are cases where intellectual property as it stands could be wielded toward this goal.
There are additionally cases where you want to encourage the thinking man. You want to cultivate that among your people. It’s a cultural decision you have to make and you want to increase the value of your assets, your assets being the things that you Control with your military power. That is the people and the property that you preside over. Maybe your people requires more of the thinking type. Maybe that is what your people do best. If your people are not builders but thinkers, it would be much better for them to be given scarcity such that they compete in this realm of ideas. And you may then subject your class of builders to executing these tasks.
George is absolutely right that in most cases, if I am encouraging intellectual property and enforcing it and my competitor is not, my competitors will have an asymmetric advantage. They’re going to take the ideas that I have publicly displayed and have a free market of competition implementing them.
However, for every rule or heuristic, there is an exception. Those exceptions can become wildly important. It is the leader who must make that distinction and have that discretion.