TimLee noted below some of the divisions of the libertarian IP debate into rights advocates and utilitarians.
The utilitarian/individual rights dichotomy is fascinating, but seems to me one can only push it so far before it collapses (I think it was Hayek who explores this collapse in more depth, too lazy to look it up right now). That’s because
a) classical liberal versions of utilitarianism tend not to discount the experience of single individuals as heavily as do more Benthamite utilitarians or law-and-econ game theorists (two examples, they rank consensual transactions highly, and Austrian-influenced thinkers would warn one to avoid of interpersonal utility comparisons);
and b) at bottom, no one is likely to give a fig for a set of individual rights that on the whole tend to lower standards of living, such that more babies with cleft palates are allowed to die, and so on. [UPDATE: hmmm, I think that is overstating the case more than a little, people do tend to have a good bit of empathy for one another, but the general point is just that, the case for individual rights had better not run *against* raising standards of living as a general matter, or it will lose].
One of the strengths of classical liberalism has always been the twining together of concern about the growth of wealth and the shrinking of poverty with concern about rights—challenges to the Corn Laws, challenges to Jim Crow laws, and so on. The fact that the two twine together is not a coincidence. It is because *if* individuals have certain rights, natural or otherwise, it is because of some key features of human beings and human life in communities, which includes economic life. At bottom, the philosophical roots of both economic thinking and rights thinking will be closely related (e.g. Locke).
The reason that IP policy debates tend to run utilitarian is not just a result of the personal mindsets of the participants, either. One is dealing with tricky stuff. Many libertarian issues are “easy,” not in the sense of being “easy” as a political matter or of getting past people’s preconceptions, but in the sense that they do not require us to revisit the basics. Few of the arguments about free trade, price controls, education, social security, indecency, health markets, tax policy, involve reconceiving of the boundary lines of contract and property that constitute markets *and* that define individual rights within those markets. IP arguments—rather like arguments about abortion–do involve arguing about where those boundaries go. What kind of rights can one have in information? Where should the boundaries be exactly? How far can the analogy to property be carried? When one is arguing about the details of where the boundaries of rights should be, well, it is tricky to make arguments from individual rights because such arguments will tend to beg the question.* One generally cannot assume the boundaries in dispute.
Because the boundaries are in dispute, furthermore, this shifts one to thinking about what those boundaries could be at some point in the future, especially, in the very long run. Then, Rawlsian veil stuff happens. Individuals tend to fade out of this picture—they themselves no longer are clear where their own interest lies, and must think about rules in the abstract. (“Constitution interest” as opposed to “action interest”). Will they be producers or consumers? Buyers or Sellers? Minority or majority? Where will the technology go? The best consensus at that point will form around rules that seem to give everyone a fair shot (more Hayek). If that shifts the boundaries of rights, that’s okay—so long as it is not retroactive, and within bounds (and one can argue about where those bounds are, too, on and on , blah blah blah).
Another thought. Some of the IP debate seems to be about individual rights, but it is really about individual interests—long or short run. Many advocacy groups are strong on *short-run individual interests* in access, low-cost, and so on, and individual rights become a vehicle for advancing that (I wonder if underlying some of this is that there are a lot of Act Utilitarians, as opposed to Rule utilitarians, kicking around here). Many tech companies are oriented to serving those interests. That’s fine. But if rights only track short-run interests, we’ve got a crummy theory of rights.
Stopping now.
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