A Libertarian Critique of Intellectual Property

Description

What is the status of intellectual property? Are patents and copyrights legitimate in a free society?

Butler Shaffer is a distinguished libertarian legal theorist who has for many years taught at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. In this monograph, he addresses an important question that has aroused much interest among libertarians: What is the status of intellectual property? Are patents and copyrights legitimate?

Shaffer responds with an appeal to fundamental libertarian principles. Only arrangements that people freely negotiate with one another are acceptable: laws imposed by a coercive state are not. Judged by this standard, intellectual property fails. People may make contracts that limit the sale or transmission of ideas or books, but these bind only those who make them. Intellectual property laws, by contrast, apply to everyone, whether people accept them or not. These laws could not have arisen through voluntary agreements.

Defenders of intellectual property maintain that inventors and writers need protection for their work. Without patents and copyrights, inventions and creative work would be impeded. Shaffer responds that most of the great creators and inventors of the past worked without patent s and copyrights. Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare, for example, did rather well without this sort of state privilege.

A Libertarian Critique of Intellectual Property is a major contribution to libertarian legal theory and an indispensable guide to a vital topic.

Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0

cf. Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (🇮🇹 transl.: Contra la proprietà intellettuale)
Shaffer focuses more on the anti-monopoly aspect of anti-©/IP.

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IP a State-created monopoly:

Article I, Section 8 of the [🇺🇸] Constitution, which provides, among other powers, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This constitutional authority created, in a legal monopolist of violence, the power to create in others monopoly property interests that did not otherwise exist, and would be enforced through the coercive powers of the state. Our legal system has long understood monopolies to be creatures of the state,4 a status that provided the recipient protection from would-be competitors.

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ancient Greek, Hero of Alexandria (10–70 AD), invented a workable steam engine—centuries before Robert Fulton patented his—a vending machine, and a device for using wind to power machines

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I disagree:

Paul Feyerabend, was even more forceful in his insistence upon unfettered liberty in fostering understanding. He noted that “[s]cience is an essentially anarchistic enterprise,” and that “theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.”