Here are some of my thoughts on intellectual property in the classical liberal tradition, since we’ve started in on this. This is a series, and it isn’t done yet. Others have also posted in this series at the ipcentral blog (category “Liberty”); these are just links to some of my own basic entries. I haven’t gotten to Jim Harper’s “Malum Prohibitum, Malum in Se” argument yet, for example. Patience, Jim.
I. Introduction–Because You Asked, Libertarians and IP
II. Rights in Ideas
III. Enforcement Problems.
IV. Natural Law
V. Public Choice and Rent-Seeking
VI. Monopoly?
VII. Alternatives, and more alternatives, and more…
Background: I used to be an IP anarchist, a la Tom Palmer and Tom Bell. But then I spent a few years working at CEI at the time that Jim Delong was also there. I was party to and audience to many, many arguments about IP, mostly involving Jim, Fred Smith, and various others. And I was persuaded that there is something to this IP stuff after all, that it is more like physical property than I ever wanted it to be. I boosted it in my mind into the category of hard problems. I don’t think I had ever done this with a policy problem before, so I’m not worried that I have any alarming tendencies to do so. And there it remains to this day.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Comments on this entry are closed.