Still think intellectual property right is a thing? Think again.
My latest for Mises:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/absurdity-intellectual-property-laws
"Property rights aspire toward social harmony in that they prescribe who gets to use which thing at what time for which purpose. Intellectual property doesn’t have that physical limitation, and social harmony is maximized by removing (unfair and immoral) protections to property over nonscarce and immaterial things."
...
"Now, the words I string together in a certain order don’t have economic value; as the joke goes, the high school student pats her dictionary before an essay deadline and says reassuringly to herself, 'All the words are in here. I just need to find the right combination.' Nobody owns the words listed in the dictionary pages, and once assembled, anyone can recreate them — speak them, sing them, recite them at a wedding, or publish them (online or in physical form).
Take another illustration of open information, where the order itself is crucial and copyrighting impossible: the game of chess. You can’t patent or copyright a chess opening, even if the system or series of moves was invented (well, discovered!) by a specific player and popularized to the point that their name was attached to the moves. Don’t chess players deserve compensation for their hard, innovative work and for furthering the game by making a unique and specific series of impressive moves? No. The reason is that rent extraction isn’t feasible for things that are nonrivalrous. Magnus Carlsen, probably the best player of all time, doesn’t receive compensation when anyone else plays the Carlsen Variation of the Sicilian Defense. (Neither does the island of Sicily.)
Chess openings exist in the ether, in human minds, available for anyone to play. Nobody (bar authoritarians) can physically exclude you from moving pieces on a board in a certain order in a game in which you and your opponent subject yourselves to specific rules. If you’ve found an opening improvement that gives you a unique advantage, it was there in the open for anyone to find. You found it in information space, among the tens of duodecillion (1040) possible chess positions.
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky found the words for his novels in language space, another information space composed of somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 headwords; he used publicly available information in a specific order to assemble “Crime and Punishment,” which anyone in principle could have found. That’s why we socially add his name to the title of the book but don’t (and shouldn’t) reward him or his descendants financially for his find. If authors or musicians can monetize their nonrivalrous creation in other, roundabout, and economically fair ways, kudos to them!"
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