Rick and I had an interesting conversation tonight: I was startled to find that Rick's a strong supporter of 'Intellectual Property Rights'. You might find this strange. Surely, that's exactly what is expected of a libertarian?: property rights are pretty much at the very bottom of their political ideology. The reason I found Rick's position on this point strange is that I genuinely believed that my stand on the issue is very compatible with libertarian views.

See, I make a very stark distinction by property rights and 'intellectual property' rights. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that I don't recognise many types of intellectual property as being even vaguely related to the concept of physical property. In case you were wondering exactly what intellectual property is, here's a list of the things which make up IP:

• Copyrights
• Patents and design rights
  
• Trademarks
• Industrial secrets

It's imporant to note that this is all there is to IP. There's no general acknowlegement that ideas are property because, under law, they're not. Indeed, a patent is for a configuration of matter, a design or a process. It grants exclusive use to a way of doing something, not that thing itself, and not the idea of that thing. Similarly, a copyright is applied to a work of creativity, not the creativity itself or the ideas that creativity produces. In fact, I, along with many other supporters of Free (libre) Software believe that IP is a term made up specifically to undermine any discussion of the issue:

At such a broad scale, people can't even see the specific public
policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised
by patent law, or any of the others. These issues arise from the
specifics, precisely what the term "intellectual property" encourages
people to ignore. For instance, one issue relating to copyright law
is whether music sharing should be allowed. Patent law has nothing to
do with this. But patent law raises the issue of whether poor
countries should be allowed to produce life-saving drugs and sell them
cheaply to save lives. Copyright law has nothing to do with that.
Neither of these issues is just an economic issue, and anyone looking
at them in the shallow economic perspectives of overgeneralization
can't grasp them. Thus, any opinion about "the issue of intellectual
property" is almost surely foolish. If you think it is one issue, you
will tend to consider only opinions that treat all these laws the
same. Whichever one you pick, it won't make any sense.

- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.html

My second reason for rejecting claims of intellectual property is related to the first. Just as it's distorting to treat IP as physical property, it's dishonest to portray what happens when IP laws are broken as akin to what happens when physical property laws are broken. I'm referring specfically to the concept that copyright infingement is theft, a type of theft, or even anything to do with that T word. Here's what Thomas Jefferson, himself a classical liberalist, had to say on the issue:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

This is what I believe. Thanks to electronic media, when I share the work of an artist with someone else, I don't believe that I'm infringing on anyone's rights: I don't recognise that any rights exist to be infringed upon. Perhaps that's a bit of a extreme view to take. Perhaps I shouldn't have expected to be agreed with, especially when Rick, expecting what I think he'd term socialist filth, was met with a view that's perhaps strikingly more libertarian on this issue than his. This whole issue just begs to be tied up in Cyberpunk mantras of 'information wants to be libre and gratis', but I don't believe I'll go there until I've seen Rick's reply.

A more modest conclusion, reflection on libre prehaps. Well there's a liberty I do believe in: my liberty to do whatever I'd like to in the comfort of my own home, when that activity doesn't adversely affect others. Copyright infringement doesn't. I'll keep doing it.