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As someone who has read Atlas 20+ times, I certainly agree that she was right about a great many things. Her utopia had no govt, but her public position on govt & IP were wrong. Rothbard was right.

Allowing any forced funding at all basically plants an evil seed that will grow into a massive empire. The amount of wealth created by a free market is huge. When any amount of theft is accepted as legitimate then all growth in societal wealth grows the parasitic class too. The only way to keep the parasites at bay is to treat all forced funding as illigetimate, so that as wealth grows there are more resources to devote to preventing theft. If all organizations are voluntarily funded then they can all naturally go out of business or be replaced if they fail to serve people.

An Alien's Angst 2y ago

Ayn Rand was absolutely right on intellectual property.

Self-Ownership means ownership of your labor whether intellectual or physical. The fact that it is difficult to enforce just means that better ways of enforcing it must be developed.

We are not a collective consciousness. My thoughts are not your thoughts. My intellectual abilities aren't the property of the group and neither are the things I make using them.

Property is both tangible and intangible. If you don't own your own consciousness - your Self - and the fruits of it's work, then you don't own anything.

Ignoring intellectual property is theft. It's far worse than physical theft for the reasons mentioned above - its a fundamental attack on all forms of property. The fact that one may want to use and claim another's ideas as their own does not make them so.

Human history makes it pretty obvious that minds are not interchangeable; ideas are not yanked out of some collective commons. Multiple discovery occurs and that's legitimate, yet that's not what we're talking about the vast majority of the time.

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Jeff Swann 2y ago

Taking credit for another person's ideas, & applying an idea are very different things. Taking credit for a book someone else wrote would be fraud. Prining a book someone else wrote, with the proper attribution, would be using your property (paper & ink) as you see fit.

Knowledge is just pattern recognition. To own a pattern is to prevent others from arranging their property however they see fit. Ideas are in many ways scarce, but they are not rivalrous. The whole point of property rights is to reduce conflict over rivalrous goods. You do not own labor, labor is an action. You are responsible for your actions, & you own the fruit of your labor to whatever degree it can be owned. But if I build a pretty house in public view I cannot attack everyone who sees or takes a picture of it.

If I can take a picture of your car & print one just like it with a machine at my house, using my energy & materials, have I stolen your car? Have I stolen a car from the manufacturer? If I decide to sell & I make it clear that I made the car & not some big company, then I haven't stolen anything. Companies do not & cannot own future sales or potential customers. Ownership takes place in the present over scarce & rivalrous goods.

Ayn Rand was wrong about IP. Intellectual property can only exist at the expense of the more basic & fundamental physical property rights. IP opens the door to an incredible amount of grifting & monopoly privledge that absolutely decimates real progress & allows many corporations to become large litigious & parasitic organizations. Any real innovation now requires a team of lawyers to defend.

I suggest you spend some time digging through Stephan Kinsella content at Mises.org or on youtube.

StackSats.IO 2y ago

“Companies do not & cannot own future sales or potential customers.” - that is not strictly true. Companies can and do restrict on-selling with rights of refusal or certain covenants on how/where something can be sold, and they can restrain trade to certain customers/groups also.

Agree with the rest though, IP and Legal fiction generally is bullshit. IP for the reasons you mention but the same applies to legal fiction, it just opens the door to grifting and loopholes when an entity can be created on paper purely to help navigate the law.