One thing that I find strange among some free marketers, especially among certain camps in the libertarian movement, is the rabid campaign to disrespect and abolish intellectual property rights (IPR).
One of the most important basis of individual freedom and personal liberty is the protection of private property rights. Your cellphone is yours and yours alone. It cannot be a cellphone of your neighbor or your friend or your city mayor or President of your country. If other people can say that "Your cellphone is also my cellphone; now, give it to me and I will use it the way I want to use it", then there will be no peace in society. Bullying and stealing is the rule of the game. And society can stagnate if not revert back to barbarism.
A group of libertarians argue that intellectual property (IP) is different from physical property. A song composition (an idea) is different from a cellphone or laptop; a blog article or magazine article or book (an idea) is different from shoes or pants or a tv set. The latter is physical property to which past and present laws and regulations on property rights apply. Thus, IP on song composition, on book (copyright) ownership, on drug molecule, should be abolished, partly because such property right was created and granted by government anyway.
There is one ideologue in the libertarian blog, http://blog.mises.org, Mr. Stephan Kinsella, who consistently argues for IP abolition. Of course there are many libertarians who also take his position.
I have argued before and I will repeat it: an idea is private property. This blog, or at least this particular blog article, is owned by Nonoy Oplas, and not by any leftist or centrist or rightist or what have you ideologue. Now it is up to the idea owner whether he/she wants his/her ideas to be shared to others for free, or be protected. If he wants to share it for free as it is part of his educational advocacies, then fine. If he wants the use of his ideas, his composition and invention, to be protected somehow, then it should be respected.
To argue that owners of ideas, composers of famous songs, authors of fantastic scientific or academic papers, inventors of important drug molecules, should be coerced, should be forced and arm-twisted, to share their inventions for free to other people, is plain dictatorship. How can such attitude be considered as advocating individual liberty?
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Related and most recent article here is IPR and medicines, part 8.
