Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property
Cause and effect, the Law of Identity, and human consciousness do not disappear simply because some people pretend that they do not exist.
All Property Is Intellectual
The anti-“intellectual property” movement is a threat to liberty represented by a belief that—at its core—is statist and collectivist as it seeks to remove the human mind from a correct understanding of what property is and is not.
“The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence.” Ayn Rand
Excerpts from my articles (available on Amazon):
So thoroughly has the Marxist “labor theory of value” permeated the fabric of our society—the false idea that a “value” results solely from one’s physical labor and that this value is “intrinsic” or inherent in some “physical” object that results from that labor—that even individuals who purport to defend freedom and its prerequisites fall unwitting (?) victims to the infectious taint that has brought untold misery to countless billions of people.
It is not physical “labor” that forms the foundation for human values. It is not physical “labor” that forms the foundation for property (as one particular type of value). As important and necessary as action (physical “labor”) is for instantiating our values, the truly indispensable factor in value of any kind is the human mind, i.e., the human intellect.
The essence of property (and its concomitant rights) is a human’s intellect, a human’s mind. The concept of “property” arises from the principle of self-ownership, a fact which (again) flows from the fundamental nature and requirements of our minds, our volitional, conceptual type of consciousness, the basic trait that separates us from all other animals. We are the only animal that can own property or possess property rights...and that is because of our intellect, NOT primarily because of our physical nature or its requirements. The anti-IP crowd self-contradictorily declares that the mind and its ideas are irrelevant to the concept or existence of property. (Remember? “Ideas contribute no necessary additional factor.”)
As Ayn Rand said, intellectual property declares that what is essential to the production of values is thought—an idea—and not merely the physical effort ultimately required to produce that value or property. To claim that all property is only that which is “physical” is implicitly to endorse the “labor theory of value.” That falsehood—the foundation of the anti-intellectual-property movement—is what is really incompatible with freedom, is what is “necessarily a statist doctrine.”
It is true that no one has an ownership right to an idea that is inherent in nature, i.e., to a discovery, an identification of some aspect of the universe that occurs independently of human existence, of human thought. A person can have a property right only to an invention, the creation of an X that did not and would not exist in nature on its own without the intervention of a human’s mind, without the use of human thought. A person has ownership to a particular formulation that has a material, i.e., physical manifestation. (For example, no one can own “quantum physics,” but a writer has ownership of his particularized and physical presentation of that idea.) The physical is important, of course. People are not ghosts. We exist in a physical world.
But those who denounce the existence or possibility of intellectual property seek to do the impossible: to sever the necessary bond, the essential connection between “property” and the human mind and the ideas—the concepts—that are the human mind’s indispensable tools. Without the input of a person’s mind, no property—of any kind—would exist. The intellectual component involved in making “oil” (or even a stone) into a “value” is no different in kind than the intellectual component of an author in making 100,000 words a “value” by placing them in a particularized order and publishing a book (electronic or physical) that contains his individualized presentation. And since a fundamental “right” is primarily about the ability to choose how to use a particular X and less about the X itself, then a creator of property can set the terms for how others may or may not have access to or use of that property.
The erroneous belief that “intellectual property” is a fallacy relies on the same kind of “concept stealing” and circular argument committed by adherents who claim that “anarchy” is a viable option for organizing human society. The latter writers smuggle in the precondition of “freedom” and a “free market” to make “anarchy” sound plausible then claim “anarchy” can lead to a “free market” and “freedom.” Those opposing “intellectual property” similarly claim that only physical things can be property and that people can have property rights only in physical things but ignore the fact that a precondition of property and rights of any kind is the existence and conceptual nature of human consciousness/thought/intellect/ideas.
Those who in engage in these types of arguments want to have their cake and keep it, too, that is, they want to deny that the concept under question, i.e., a “free market” or “property (rights),” depends on a previously established condition or concept, i.e., a free society or ideas (the “intellect”). But reversing or ignoring causation (e.g., claiming that an anarchic-style “free market” leads to freedom or that [physical] property or property rights can exist sans ideas) does not save these propositions from violating the Law of Noncontradiction.
I don’t know what the motivations or goals are of those seeking to eradicate ideas from the nature or origins of “property” and “property rights,” but one thing that no one should forget is that any and all property and all rights are, at their root, intellectual.
The anti-intellectual property people are guilty of “definition by nonessentials.” A proper definition focuses on those traits that explain the most about what “X” is metaphysically and how “X” operates or functions epistemologically. Without human intellect, there is no such thing as property of any kind, physical or intellectual. Anti-intellectual property people equate property with mere physicality, thus evading what is most fundamental about property and necessary for its very existence: the human intellect.
The anti-intellectual property people are also aligned with economic materialism: the notion that the external, the physical determines human intellect; that those external factors are what is most important about people: that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (Karl Marx, in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.) This is a reversal of cause-and-effect.
The anti-intellectual property people also implicitly endorse the mind/body dichotomy by illogically maintaining that the mind (intellect) is irrelevant to property rights; that mind is, in essence, divorced from the body (the physical) (the material) rather than being integral to human existence and property.
The anti-intellectual property people also deny cause-and-effect when they divorce the creation from the creator, i.e., separate property from the intellect of an individual that is required for any and all creation. They focus only on the result (the effect) (the intellectual property) as though such a result magically comes into being and would exist without the cause (human intellect). This view is consonant with how statists view creators and producers: they are magical beings who will continue to function and provide goods regardless of what chains are placed upon them and regardless of how their rights are violated.
All of this is horrendous in its origins, execution, and implications.
Denying the existence and legitimacy of intellectual property undermines the foundation of morality, rights, property, freedom, and the individual; such denial supports and is integral to statism and collectivism.
All Property Is Intellectual
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