Intellectual Property is Common Property

Version 1.01, 2015-12-03

This essay was originally submitted as a master dissertation in philosophy on 8. September 2014 to the Open University, Milton Keynes. It is available in various E-Book formats, as a printed book and as an online book.

ISBN: 978-3-03805-039-1 (print), 978-3-03805-197-8 (PDF), 978-3-03805-198-5 (ePub), 978-3-03805-199-2 (mobi/kindle)

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Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1. The Classical Justifications for Intellectual Property Rights Justification by natural law Utilitarian justification Justification by personality rights Justifications for intellectual property rights restrictions

  2. Control Rights and Income Rights, or Does The Creator Deserve His De Jure Monopoly? Income Rights Control Rights

  3. The Myth of The Individual Creator The creator as a meme copy machine The creative process as a collective process

  4. A Just Society with Intellectual Commons The missing evidence for the incentive argument Libertarian justification for intellectual commons Egalitarian justification for intellectual commons The creative work as a common good

  Conclusion

  Literature

  About the Author

1

Foreword

Defenders of intellectual property rights argue that these rights are justified because creators and inventors deserve compensation for their labour, because their ideas and expressions are their personal property and because the total amount of creative work and innovation increases when inventors and creators have a prospect of generating high income through the exploitation of their monopoly rights. This view is not only widely accepted by the general public, but also enforced through a very effective international legal framework. And it is endorsed by most academic researchers and commentators in this field.

In this essay, I will show that the classical arguments for the justification of private intellectual property rights can be contested, and that there are many good reasons to abolish intellectual property rights completely in favour of an intellectual commons where every person is allowed to use every cultural expression and invention in whatever way he wishes.

I will first give a short overview of the classical arguments for the justification of intellectual property as they are usually stated. We will then discuss the question of whether the creator or inventor deserves his de jure monopoly, by using John Christman’s categories of income and control rights to analyse property rights. The aim here is to show that it does not make sense to create control rights for abstract objects, as they are not scarce, and that there is no logical connection between the surplus which may be generated through income rights and the labour which has been put into a cultural artefact or an invention, and therefore it is not justified to grant monopoly rights on the basis of Lockean natural rights arguments for self-ownership and the just appropriation of worldly resources.

As it is possible to reject Christman’s property rights categories, I will then go on to show on the basis of Richard Dawkins’ postulation of the ‘meme’ and Ludwik Fleck’s theory of the ‘thought collective’ that creative processes should be interpreted as interpersonal or collective processes, and therefore it is not justified to grant intellectual property rights to individuals on the basis of the idea that the individual who has put labour into the creative work or the invention should be the one to whom the contents of the work belong exclusively.

As it is still possible to postulate the utilitarian argument that intellectual property rights are just because they increase the amount of creative works and inventions, I will argue in the last chapter that, from a libertarian as well as from an egalitarian point of view, the justification of intellectual monopoly rights on utilitarian grounds cannot be maintained. Therefore it is time to abolish the current global intellectual property law regime in favour of an intellectual commons for the good of all human beings and societies.

Switzerland, Mai 2015

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!