What is the difficulty in trying to claim that people have natural rights to the ownership of intellectual property such as software? Is there a consequentialist justification for maintaining ownership of intellectual property such as software?
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Characterise and distinguish between consequentialist ethical theories and ... with respect to The Public Interest. ... to the ownership of intellectual property such as software? Is there a consequentialist
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Q What is the difficulty in trying to claim that people have natural rights to the ownership of intellectual property such as software?
ans The difficulty is that none of the philosophical justifications for natural rights (that I am aware of) can seem to find a justification for intellectual “property.” Therefore, no matter what standpoint you take as far as natural rights, it is always a stretch to find a way in which owning property in other people’s thoughts and actions (because that is really what intellectual property means: owning a thought, so that others are not allowed to act on it if they also have that thought) is justified.
The only example of a natural rights framework in which intellectual property comes close to flowing naturally from its own philosophical justifications and fitting into its ethical framework would be Objectivism, where man primarily owns the workings of his own mind and therefore “in theory” would own the products of it and hence have property over any intellectual “property” he has created — software for example. However, this does not really make sense even here, since one can own one’s own thoughts while another person has similar thoughts.
And this really brings me to the heart of the problem: intellectual “property” is almost non-excludable once it is actually used — someone can always look at the machine you constructed and try to reverse-engineer it, even if you have had all the people that worked on it sign NDAs — and it is certainly non-rivalrous. This last is the most important aspect of intellectual “property” that makes it difficult for any system of natural rights to justify as an ownership right, and I touched on it above when speaking of Objectivism: because it is non-rivalrous, unlike regular property just because one person has control of it does not imply that another loses control of it. So any “right” that would ordinarily be justified by propertarian natural rights philosophy to “intellectual property” would imply that one would have control over your own instance of it, which totally leaves out others having their own instance, since them having and instance does not take away your instance, unlike ownership over particular objects, where if someone else has my Volkswagen Golf, that automatically means that I do not have it. In order to make a “right” to “intellectual property” work as it does now, one would have to go beyond the kind of specific rights that propertarian natural rights philosophy grants, and therefore out of the system that such natural rights can justify, into a broader world where one can control the actions of others, or every instance of certain objects, or even the thoughts of others — deep and dark waters, these.
Q Is there a consequentialist justification for maintaining ownership of intellectual property such as software?
ans. The consequentialist justification for ownership of intellectual property is basically that innovators and inventors will have more of a profit motive to do the things they do if they can get the maximum use out of the idea they are working on for at least a limited amount of time. If, instead, as soon as they come to market with an idea it is stolen, they will get less profit, and therefore in the future, and ahead of time if they know about the lack of laws, they will be less motivated to invent new ideas or bring them to market.
There are other tributary justifications as well: because of the desire to make the most out of a new idea before competitors borrow it and by increasing supply decrease prices, people who are bringing new ideas to a market without IP will have a strong incentive to do their best to keep their ideas out of the hands of possible competitors, perhaps through trade secrets and/or NDAs. The problem with this is that it means that if whoever has this knowledge dies, that knowledge is lost with them, and can never be recovered. At least with intellectual property, you are forced to make public how your idea works, at least to the government.