I do however believe that it is necessary to consider real-world consequences of any position, even those that follow from libertarian principles. I am not saying that a negative practical consequence of a libertarian principle is enough to reject it (it is not, because freedom has an intrinsic value) but simply that we cannot be blind to reality. Basically the kind of libertarianism I adhere to is one that undertakes a cost-benefit analysis of consequences, where an additional intrinsic (and large) value of freedom is included in the chart of costs and benefits (with freedom defined in the libertarian sense). The reason I do this, is that while much of what is ‘good’ can be reduced to choice, some things cannot. If I have to give a label to my personal ideology, it would be ‘pragmatic minarchist’. Think of it as somewhere between natural rights libertarianism and consequentialism.

In other words, there is a genuine case for supporting some laws as ‘necessary evils’, even if they do not follow from libertarian principles. Thankfully, there are not many such laws I support. However I do support taxation. I also support a government role in roads. I support some restrictions in the interest of security (e.g. mandatory security checks before entering the aiplane). I do not believe individuals should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.

A very *limited* copyright and patent regime is one of them.

“As I wrote, I am not saying there should be no IP laws, but merely that the matter is more complex than is often acknowledged.”

There is no logical argument for “intellectual property”.

Only utilitarian arguments that favor “ip” exist.

With these kind of arguments you could also argue for the benefits of slavery. Utilitarian arguments are therefore crap and have nothing to do with the righteousness of something.

I go with Tucker:

“”If a man scatters money in the street, he does not therefore formally relinquish title to it … but those who pick it up are thereafter considered the rightful owners … Similarly a man who reproduces his writings by thousands and spreads them everywhere voluntarily abandons his right of privacy and those who read them … no more put themselves by the act under any obligations in regard to the author than those who pick up scattered money put themselves under obligations to the scatterer.”

Interesting background:
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/libhe/libhe014.htm

Patents are even worse. Segway has a patent that basically precludes anyone else from creating a similar device. I don’t see how this can be defended from privacy considerations.

Lastly I would question your contention that privacy can be legitimately viewed as a property. In the example of using a sonar, the property in question is your house, not the privacy. By divulging the contents of your house to everyone else, I am creating unacceptable consequences for you. By contrast, if I were to merely take a picture of you in a public area and post it online, it would be perfectly fine because I am not violating your privacy. So, privacy is very case-specific and to claim that IP can be based upon the notion of viewing it as a property seems far-fetched. As far as secrecy etc. are concerned they are just examples of contract. So what you might be proposing is basing IP on contract laws. But that is not anything new, software licenses work on precisely that principle.

As I wrote, I am not saying there should be no IP laws, but merely that the matter is more complex than is often acknowledged.

Privacy is indeed a unique right. If someone uses sonar on my property to determine the contents of my house, why should they have a right to that information? If I have a contract with someone to keep my idea a secret, and they break the contract, by what right does the recipient possess that knowledge? Nobody owes anybody information, but they owe each other respect for the other person’s privacy.

All that’s left now is to find a good way to turn this theory into practice and we will have our solution.

Anyone with half a brain should be able to say that if someone created a work, it belongs to him. People can disagree on the legal methods used to grant protection to copyrighted works, whether the protection should be of a perpetual kind (Mark Twain wanted it) and how far the copyright owner can extend his control on the end use of his work, particularly that which occurs in the confines of the consumer’s home - dvd or cd ripping and copying, scanning magazines and books and keeping such images on the computer for easy access and so on.

That, however, goes to the heart of the matter. In a naive sense, if someone created a work, it belongs to him. However, intellectual property is fundamentally different from tangible (physical) property. Think about people who view or read the work. It becomes a part of their intellectual repertoire too and surely they have ownership upon anything thats part of their brain. Therefore overly restrictive copyright laws can actually hurt individual liberty and rights by preventing one from expressing one’s thoughts and ideas. Of course you may say that it is only expressions of ideas that are copyrightable and not the ideas themselves; plus there is the fair use exception. In practice however, the situation is more complex than that. Thus, conflicting notions of freedom come into play, and there are no easy answers.

My position, which I hope to expand upon some day, is that there should be some copyright, but it ought to be much less restrictive than what it is today. I have a similar position with respect to patents, and I agree with you that the current IP regime ‘has facilitated a jump from legal protection to legal terrorism.’

Patents are a tricky issue. While I am for regular patents based on the condition of non-obviousness, I am against patents on algorithms and methods (like those used in claims for software patents and patents on business methods), That said, I am a little ambivalent on breakthroughs like the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle Key Exchange and RSA Public Key Cryptography algorithms because of the problems they solved. Did they or did they not deserve patent protection in spite of being mathematical algorithms?

The problem with the present IP regime is that there is too little of innovation and too much of law. Patent trolls are running amok with suspicious patents that the USPTO sometimes seems to grant (the one on turmeric, or the one on play lists for e.g.), and companies are paying up rather than risk a lawsuit with an unknown outcome. This has facilitated a jump from legal protection to legal terrorism.