In What Are Words Worth?, the author writes:
I was listening to a podcast talk from Mises University 2009 the other night called “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism”, in which speaker Stephan Kinsella made the usual Slashdotty-type case against IP from a libertarian perspective. This was novel for me, perhaps because libertarians tend to be very defensive of property rights, such as Ayn Rand’s assertion of IP as a right to the products of a person’s own mind.
Kinsella rejects Rand explicitly, saying her case offers little more than deification of the creator. His counter-argument is interesting: IP is inconsistent with property rights because it violates the rights of others to use their property. To wit, if I own a typewriter and a stack of paper, or a CD burner and some blank discs, then those should be mine to do with as I see fit. But because of copyright, I can’t use the typewriter to transcribe a book, or to use the burner to copy a CD, even if I’ve bought original copies of the hypothetical book and CD. IP asserts a partial ownership — enough to say “you can’t do that” — over this other property I own. That, according to Kinsella’s argument, is inconsistent and therefore invalid.
Interesting, and tricky, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.
It’s important because, of course, my income is highly dependent on the idea of IP. If I couldn’t charge for copies of iPhone SDK Development, I probably wouldn’t have spent hundreds (possibly thousands?) of hours over the last year and a half co-writing it. If I couldn’t charge for apps on the App Store, would I write them?
The counter-argument comes from the open-source crowd, who say to give away your content (which, by the earlier argument, you couldn’t own anyways), and make your money some other way.
The author here is admirably open-minded. I think he is a bit confused when he says the “counter-argument” is to give away your content, but he also inadvertently hits on an important insight. It’s not a “counterargument” of ours to say you “should” just give away content. This is rather a prediction that some business models may employ this approach. But note the author says: “If I couldn’t charge for copies of iPhone SDK Development,…” Well, of course you can charge for copies. It’s just that it might be hard to prevent others from offering it for free or for a lower price, if you don’t find some means of exclusion. In other words, part of the entrepreneur’s job is to find efficient means of exclusion. Drive-in movie theater owners employ ticket counters, pay for locks on the doors, and for the installation of hundreds of parking-lot per-car speakers to exclude free-riders. Every business has costs of exclusion. If, in the end, the entrepreneur finds that he cannot make a profit in a given endeavor, taking all costs–including costs of exclusion–into account, then that project would require an inefficient allocation of capital. Simple.
[AM Crosspost]
