For whatever reason, I think someone’s got something against Cato, but why?

“Why should a person working out of their garage trust anyone with their ideas if there is no protection for intangible property? How can they feel comfortable going to engineers, designers, marketers, or anyone else that could help them develop their dreams, but is a likely candidate for theft.”

The transaction you just identified is almost never protected by intellectual property. Intellectual property does not kick in until after the idea has been developed. There is no reasonable reason to suspect that your lawyer, engineer, marketer or other contractual partner will run off with the innovators innovation because they should be contractually bound not to compete with the innovation prior to disclosing the innovation to these third-parties. Contract law, then, is the basis for ensuring that ideas are not stolen in this context.

Whether intellectual property in-fact provides a real benefit to the economy is a question open for debate. China appears to be doing just fine without it. Without intellectual property, companies identify ways to market their products so that they cannot be easily copied.

The casualty of a system without intellectual property would be the lack of transparency in communicating new ideas for others to use and build off of in the future. On the flip side, innovators would be free to come up with the idea regardless of who figured it out first.

Unfortunately, IP discussions seems to suffer from a overemphasis and over-reliance on the Lockean Proviso, which states that property is legitimate so long as there is as much and as good available. As I believe the Austrians have shown, this principle makes no sense. Property is required when there is scarcity. When the object is freely available to all (air) property serves no purpose. So what should we make of IP if the Lockean Proviso is abolished.

Why should a person working out of their garage trust anyone with their ideas if there is no protection for intangible property? How can they feel comfortable going to engineers, designers, marketers, or anyone else that could help them develop their dreams, but is a likely candidate for theft.

If the law doesnt consider it property, then there can be no theft, and you have set up a free-for-all where anything goes. You have also destroyed the possibility for unconventional and out-of-the-box thinking by those inventors outside of the mainstream. In other words, you have destroyed the idea economy.

The free market ideal is not a proposal for a “free-for-all law of the jungle” scenario. It is a disciplined ideology that recognizes that your rights begin and end where they criss-cross the rights of others. Without intellectual property rights, then there is no way of making illegal for another individual or company from literally stealing your intangible property. While the current patent and copyright system doesn’t prevent theft, it does build the legal basis for those property rights. They are the “deed” to your intangible property.

Since when do Libertarians believe that there should be no property rights? Intellectual or otherwise? A “self-government” ideology is nothing without property rights, even if that property isn’t tangible. Wasn’t the lack of property rights the ideology of the Socialists?

“Progressive-libertarian alliance” ??? I don’t even know what that means. I can’t see how there can be any alliance on something like this. I can’t call anyone that supports stuff like this a libertarian.

It is a mild joke to me how these people just throw out gigantic numbers and then don’t understand how out of control spending has gotten. $30 billion? That is 600,000 times the median household income in the United State.