Intellectual Property is IMAGINARY property
If you can’t touch it, it isn’t property
If nothing has been physically taken from you, you haven’t experienced theft
If something can be duplicated without physically removing anything from the original, the original has NOT been “stolen”
Intellectual property is fundamentally a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. A person can take an action on their own property (a piece of paper, a t-shirt, a computer), and in order to stop them from “stealing” intellectual “property”, you have to initiate violence against that individual, and violate their private property rights.
“Protecting” innovation – actually STIFLES innovation, by restricting iteration and improvement
“People won’t innovate or take the financial risk of bringing a new product to the market if someone else can then copy it” – We can see that is NOT true, even in our current system.
Apple “invented” the smartphone, or at least created the first widely successful smartphone product. Now there are dozens of companies making BETTER smartphones at lower prices, and Apple is not hurting for market share.
Why? People value something about the SERVICE and QUALITY of the product, or even the STATUS it provides, despite the existence of “duplicate” products, whether superior or inferior.
On the other hand, many markets have been “captured” by regulation and protection of imaginary “intellectual property”. And in my view, this violent elimination of competition in the market is the explanation for much of the perceived “inequality” in modern societies, where celebrities and professional athletes can receive much higher compensation for the work they do, because they exist in captured markets protected from competition by “intellectual property”.
IDEAS aren’t property. And suppressing COMPETING ideas using violence can’t possibly produce a preferable outcome to an open, free market of ideas.
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