I have recently finished a book by libertarian Stephan Kinsella called «Against Intellectual Property,» which as the book title indicates is a book that argues against intellectual property rights (IP rights). In the book he reviewed the various arguments for and against, and I was surprised to learn that my standard defense of intellectual property is nowhere to be seen. In fact, by the very absence of this argument I developed a completely novel argument for IP.

But before I get to that, let me review the part that led me to my conclusion. In the book Kinsella discusses the standard libertarian view against IP, namely the need for resource scarcity. Kinsella argues powerfully that it is the scarcity of a resource which produces the need for a property right. If all resources were infinitely abundant then you wouldn’t need exclusive property rights to organize the allocation of resources. Information is not a scarce resource, you can copy it infinitely, and hence it should not be protected by property rights.

My standard response to this argument (both to Kinsella himself in a debate a few years ago and to all other libertarians who use it) is that it is not information that is the scarce resource that needs protection, but mental labor. An author only has a limited amount of seconds in his life to do stuff, and is that precious time that needs protection through property rights, including IP.

I have never ever received anything that remotely resembles an intelligent response to this argument, to my great annoyance, neither by Kinsella nor by anyone else. In fact, usually this argument leads to a change of subject. Some other line of reasoning against IP is then typically introduced, but not along the lines of resource scarcity.

After reading Kinsella’s book I suddenly understood why: there is no response to this argument in the libertarian literature. In fact, Kinsella contrasts the resource scarcity argument with the Objectivist argument that ownership flows from creation, not from resource scarcity. That is, if you create something, you own it regardless of whether it is a scarce resource or not. So the standard response of Objectivists is, to my equally great surprise, not the scarcity of the mind, but creation as the source of property rights.

This leads me to conclude that my standard argument for intellectual property, which I have always taken for granted as completely obvious, is in fact my own novel argument, which therefore is not very well known. But now that I know this, I can use this knowledge to present an even more powerful argument against Kinsella’s position, and in the process synthesize the libertarian and Objectivist position.

My novel insight is that there is no resource scarcity in the universe. The total amount of energy and matter in the universe is such a staggeringly large figure that were we to divide it equally among 7 billion people, each person would have more resources than he could ever dream of utilizing in his life span. For all practical purposes the universe is infinite, and hence infinitely abundant in resources.

You might now immediately respond that this fact is irrelevant to our daily lives here on Earth, because most of the universe is unavailable to us. In fact, most resources in our own solar system are completely beyond our reach. Yes, even most resources here on Earth are simply unavailable to us. Due to our limitations we are unable to drill more than a few thousand meters into the Earth’s crust. We are not able to efficiently utilize the energy and matter in the universe because we have limited intelligence, limited time and limited abilities. All this is true, and it means that for us resources are scarce, not due to some intrinsic scarcity in the resources themselves, but due to the scarcity of our life. The source of scarcity is not out there in the universe, but within our own finite, limited beings.

What I have done just now is to demolish the standard libertarian argument for property rights (and against IP). They now have a choice, namely to abandon the scarcity argument altogether, or to move the scarcity from out there in the universe into the individual, essentially landing on the Objectivist (and standard Lockean) position, namely that creation is the source of property rights because for us our ability to create is the ultimate scarce resource in the universe! All other forms of scarcity are just derivatives of our limited ability to create.

From this it also follows that there is nothing inherently wrong with IP because IP does not protect information, but rather the limited resource we call intellectual labor. I challenge anti-IP libertarians to try to dismantle this argument, not by reference to other lines of argument, but with respect to scarcity. As far as I can tell, they will fail abysmally.