This article is a sequel to our special print debate issue. Below, you’ll find the case against the resolution, followed by the case in favour.
Should Libertarians Defend Intellectual Property? No!
by Jonas Kurus
Alexander Graham Bell is remembered as the inventor of the telephone, but few people recall that his triumph was determined by a matter of hours. On February 14, 1876, Bell submitted his patent application just two hours before his competitor, Elisha Gray, filed a similar one. This small twist of fate enshrined Bell as a great inventor and pushed Gray into historical obscurity. The episode illustrates something profoundly troubling about intellectual property: that the fate of ideas—and by extension, the wealth and recognition attached to them—can depend less on creative merit than on bureaucratic timing and paperwork. For a political philosophy that champions voluntary exchange, free competition, and skepticism toward state power, this should be a red flag.
Libertarians are not unanimous about intellectual property (IP), but they share certain core principles: the sanctity of self-ownership, the legitimacy of property acquired through voluntary means, and the conviction that state coercion should be minimised. Property rights, in the libertarian framework, arise as a moral and practical solution to the problem of scarcity. In a world of limited physical resources, property rights define who may use what, preventing conflicts over rivalrous goods. If I own a plot of land, a car, or a house, my ownership excludes others from using it without consent. This exclusivity is essential because these goods cannot be simultaneously used by multiple people. As John Locke argued, when individuals “mix their labour” with unowned resources—when they cultivate land, build a shelter, or craft a tool—they acquire a moral claim to it, derived from their self-ownership.
However, applying this same logic to intellectual creations introduces a deep inconsistency. Unlike physical objects, ideas are not scarce. If I learn a scientific principle, repeat a melody, or replicate a design, I do not deprive the original inventor or composer of their ability to use it. Ideas can be infinitely copied and shared, allowing everyone to benefit simultaneously without conflict. The very rationale for property rights—managing scarcity—disappears. Property is necessary to resolve disputes over limited things, but with ideas, there is no natural rivalry to resolve.
Consider the analogy of a spear. In the Stone Age, only one hunter could wield a spear at a time; ownership mattered because its use was exclusive. But if one hunter discovered a new technique for sharpening the spear or for tracking prey, that knowledge could spread across the tribe without limiting his own use of it. No one would be harmed by its dissemination; indeed, everyone would gain. Intellectual property laws attempt to impose scarcity on what is naturally abundant.
The problem goes deeper than non-scarcity. Intellectual creation is inherently cumulative. Every new idea builds upon countless others that came before it—language, mathematics, scientific understanding, cultural motifs. No one invents in a vacuum. A musician’s song is influenced by existing genres and rhythms; a scientist’s discovery relies on prior research. If we tried to trace every influence and pay every “owner” of the ideas we have absorbed, innovation would come to a halt. By the logic of self-ownership, intellectual property fails the universality test: its principles cannot be applied consistently without collapsing into absurdity.
Moreover, the process by which ideas are “owned” under IP law is arbitrary. Patent offices decide what counts as novel, useful, and non-obvious; copyright laws determine how long ownership lasts; trademarks define which words or symbols are off-limits. These are not natural boundaries but legislative inventions. They vary by country, by decade, and by interpretation. A supposedly universal moral right cannot depend on the shifting judgment of bureaucrats. Property in land or tools emerges spontaneously from use and exchange; property in ideas exists only on the basis of legal regulation.
Some defenders of IP abandon the natural-rights justification and instead appeal to utilitarian grounds: society needs intellectual property to encourage innovation. If creators cannot profit exclusively from their inventions, they argue, fewer people will invest time and resources in producing new works. At first glance, this seems plausible—why spend years inventing a vaccine or composing a symphony if others can freely copy your work? But this reasoning overlooks both the real-world functioning of markets and the unintended consequences of IP enforcement.
In practice, intellectual property often slows down innovation rather than promoting it. Patents create monopolies that prevent others from improving existing inventions. Legal disputes over overlapping patents—so-called “patent thickets”—cost billions and discourage competition. Start-ups and small businesses that cannot afford legal disputes are discouraged from entering markets dominated by large corporations that accumulate patents for defensive reasons. Instead of stimulating progress, intellectual property can freeze it.
The utilitarian justification also assumes that monopoly is the only means of rewarding creative effort, which history disproves. The evolution of the music industry offers a vivid example. In the early 2000s, rampant online piracy seemed to threaten musicians’ livelihoods. Record labels fought back with lawsuits and digital restrictions, but these efforts largely failed. Instead, the industry adapted through market processes. Artists embraced streaming platforms like YouTube and Spotify, where audiences could access music freely or cheaply. Musicians began to earn revenue from concerts, merchandise, sponsorships, and fan patronage. The result was not the collapse of music but a flourishing of accessibility.
Similarly, open-source software communities show how creativity can flourish even without strict enforcement of intellectual property rights. Programs such as Linux, Firefox, and Blender were developed collaboratively and released for free. Yet they match or even surpass patented alternatives in quality and innovation. These examples suggest that when barriers to entry are lowered and knowledge flows freely, human creativity expands rather than shrinks. The motivation for innovation does not have to lie in exclusivity, but can arise from reputation, first-mover advantage, and the internal satisfaction of creation.
Last but not least, intellectual property often conflicts with physical property. It gives the state power to dictate how individuals may use their own physical property. If I own a printing press or a 3D printer, IP laws restrict me from using it to reproduce certain patterns of ink or design, even if I acquired all materials lawfully. This violates the principle of self-ownership. IP does not protect property—it restricts it.
A genuinely free society would protect property in scarce goods and liberty in the realm of ideas. Knowledge grows through sharing, not hoarding. Innovation thrives not when ideas are owned, but when minds are free to build upon them.
Should Libertarians Defend Intellectual Property? Yes!
by Ruben Ranval
In 2023, a slasher film titled Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was released. Shot in just eight days on a budget of under $100,000, it was widely ridiculed by critics, won seven Razzie Awards, and is by all accounts a film of little artistic merit. Yet it managed to gross $7.7 million at the box office and was followed by a sequel no one asked for.
Why did such a poorly made film succeed? Not because of originality or effort, but because it shamelessly exploited the reputation of A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, which had fallen into the public domain just a year before. It is hard to imagine Blood and Honey earning even a fraction of that attention had it simply been about a generic teddy bear turned serial killer. Its box-office success did not come from originality, but from the legal theft of someone else’s creative achievement and years of hard work.
Libertarians and classical liberals view property rights as a foundation of liberty. They usually justify property rights with three key arguments: self-ownership, scarcity, and incentives. Let’s examine whether these same arguments apply to intellectual property.
A core libertarian principle is self-ownership: the idea that every individual owns themselves, their body, and the fruits of their labour. To deny a person ownership of what they create is to deny ownership of their labour. All libertarians would agree that a carpenter owns the chair he makes. They would also likely agree that an inventor who builds a new kind of machine owns that machine. But when it comes to intellectual labour: an author writing a novel, a filmmaker creating a character, a composer writing a symphony, the consensus suddenly breaks down.
From the standpoint of self-ownership, this is puzzling. Why should the carpenter enjoy full and indefinite ownership of his chair, while the author is told that his work does not fully belong to him, or only for a few decades, after which it has to be redistributed to the “public domain”?To say that creations of individuals or companies belong to the “public domain” after an arbitrary period is no different than saying a person’s house should be redistributed after a few decades.
Intellectual labour is labour, and indeed is the source of all labour. As Locke argued, mixing your labour with something unowned makes it yours. Turning an idea into a novel, a film, or a symphony is no less labor than building a chair. Creators deserve enduring rights to protect their creations, whether tangible or intellectual, from looters.
Libertarians who oppose intellectual property, however, argue that this analogy does not apply to ideas since, unlike chairs, houses, or any tangible goods, ideas are not scarce. A house cannot be lived in by two families at once without conflict, but an idea can be shared, reproduced, and used simultaneously by an unlimited number of people without depriving the original creator of access to it. Scarcity is the key condition that makes property rights necessary: we need rules to decide who controls scarce resources so that conflicts can be resolved peacefully.
Ideas may not be scarce, but valuable ones are. A new vaccine or hit movie requires talent, work, and timing. If ideas were truly abundant, why would tech companies pour billions into R&D, racing to be the first to make the next breakthrough?
To understand this better, we need to distinguish between two kinds of scarcity [1]: static and dynamic. Static scarcity refers to resources that are rivalrous: if I eat an apple, you cannot eat it. Time is another example: each of us has only twenty-four hours in a day, and once an hour is gone, it is gone forever. Dynamic scarcity, by contrast, applies to the act of creation. Once an idea exists it can be copied freely, but producing it requires scarce resources: time, effort and talented people. A life-saving vaccine can perhaps be copied almost instantaneously, but discovering it may take billions in research and years of experimentation. A blockbuster film can be duplicated endlessly on USB sticks, but its production requires large investments. In both cases, the copies are cheap, but the original creative act is scarce and costly.
Seen this way, all trade ultimately consists in exchanging our scarce time for someone else’s. When we buy an apple, we are really trading a slice of our time for a slice of the farmer’s. When we buy a book, we’re really exchanging our hours for the writer’s. Time and talent are the scarce resources being traded here. Property rights, whether over tangible goods or over ideas, are simply a recognition of this fact: the time we have is limited, and what we can produce with it is scarce. As such, just like any other kind of scarce property, ideas too must be protected so that conflicts over their ownership can be resolved peacefully.
Lastly, from a utilitarian standpoint, property rights create incentives for productivity. When people know that the fruits of their labour will remain theirs, they are more willing to take risks, invest time, and create. Libertarians readily accept this principle for physical property. A landowner is unlikely to develop his land and build houses if he thinks that the government might seize his property after a few decades under some pretence, such as “to give others a chance to develop it” or “preventing monopolies on land”.
Yet these are precisely the rationales invoked by libertarians who oppose IP on utilitarian grounds: that copyrights and patents stifle innovation or grant monopolies. By that same utilitarian logic, should private land ownership be restricted if it doesn’t maximise housing output, or if one person owns “too much” land in an area?
Just as with tangible goods, the long-term security of property rights in ideas creates the incentive to invest and trade. If property rights over physical goods are perpetual and transferable, and intellectual property is fundamentally similar to other property rights, as it can be justified by using the same arguments, why should property rights in intellectual creations arbitrarily expire? Why should authors or moviemakers have less ownership rights over their work than carpenters or landowners? Why shouldn’t copyright be perpetual like any other kind of property? Of course, critics warn of monopolies and rent-seeking, but these dangers exist with every form of property. As libertarians, we defend ownership because we believe that the cure for abuse is never the abolition of rights, but rather competition and the rule of law.
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[1] The distinction between those two kinds of scarcity is discussed on p.16 of http://tomgpalmer.com/wp-content/uploads/papers/hamlineip.pdf (cf. footnote 50).
