Comment by Nutmog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nutmog | Hacker News Reader

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That's stretching the definition of free market a bit. You could apply it to real estate property rights too and argue that a corner shop isn't in a free market because the owner has paid for a monopoly on access to that building which is most suited to selling things from. His property rights are protected by the police to stop competitors sending their goons in to take over the building. The same goes for any business that owns any sort of valuable property, especially if their ownership gives them exclusive access to it. So I think a useful definition of free market has to include various property rights, including IP. As long as people can trade those rights among each other, whoever holds the patent would probably have spent a fair amount of money to either invent or buy it.

There is always debate over the extent of "free". At the extreme, the state doesn't enforce land property and the landlord is responsible for hiring an army to protect some land.

In a more moderate situation land and property are organized and enforced by the state, because this protection is more efficient for everyone.

Intellectual property is incredibly hard to enforce, because anyone can copy an idea, or bits on a hard drive, so you'll have to come up with convoluted solutions to check for the presence of information at every point in a network, and we're expecting citizen to pay taxes to pay the police force who will enforce those rights in favour of the owners.

There are other, more efficient means, but they involve the richest to get a smaller cut (e.g. instead of the state enforcing DRMs for free, they have to pay for good DRM themselves), so it's very valuable for them to leverage the state to enforce their self-proclaimed rights.

There's a fundamental difference between physical property and intellectual "property": an owner of the former can conceivably hire guards to protect or restrict access to that property, since physical objects are generally localized phenomena.

But there is no conceivable way to enforce things like copyright or patents without something at least as powerful as a government, since they are supposed to be binding on every single person, everywhere, all the time.

IMO the concept of "intellectual property" is at best orthogonal to that of a "free market".

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