Oh, and sell your product even after the initial release. This works great right now considering the defacto lack of property rights on music files. You can get them all for free but people still pay for them, a lot.

It is good to see that there are at least some reasonable people on this forum. Patents are a sham in execution for several reasons. One of the primary reasons for this is that there is missing a crucial kind of intellectual property. I will write more about this in a future book, but let me quickly summarize it. Today patents make the information freely available to anyone, but the economic utilization of the information is restricted. A copyright restricts distribution but anyone can utilize the information economically. What is needed is a new kind of information property right that is something in between a copyright and a patent. I call it a scientific property right. Here there are no restrictions on who can distribute the information, but there is a fee associated with publication. The information itself can be economically utilized in any way.

This is particularly well suited for scientific publication (which already has an extremely well-developed reference system), including university books. Scientific property rights come in three variations:


1) scientific data property rights
2) scientific method property rights
3) scientific discovery property rights


Let's go through with examples. Suppose there is a team of people who have decoded human DNA, (like the human genome project). These people could then publish it and acquire scientific data property rights to this data. What this means is that anyone who wants to download this data, look at it, study it and utilize it economically are free to do so at no cost and no restrictions. However, anyone who PUBLISHES a paper that UTILIZES and/or REFERENCES the data in their work must pay a fee for the data. The data is exclusive, but not the source. Anyone can go back to the source (the human genome in this case) and make a new data set that can be made public domain or given a similar data property right, even when the two data sets are identical (they usually aren't).

These data property rights would in this case be an excellent alternative to the horrible gene patents that sometimes are given for "isolating" DNA.

Scientific method property rights works similar to the data property rights except that they resemble patents. There is no data source. It's the method itself that is exclusive. Once a scientific method has been protected by property rights no-one else can do the same with an identical method. Those who e.g. publish statistical or other mathematical methods would here find a revenue model for their work. Again, it's free to READ and USE the methods in economic activity, but if you publish a scientific paper based on them in which you use this method and reference it, you pay a fee.

This is an extremely good alternative to patents, especially for small inventors, because you don't have to actually implement the idea or invest millions of dollars in it in order to get revenues from it. So long as people write about it and reference it they pay a fee, and the economic usage and availability of the invention is in the public domain.

Finally, sometimes a scientific discovery is made, and it has extreme news value in the first year or so and then it ceases to be of such great value. A discovery right ONLY protects the revenue from PUBLICATION of the discovery. In other words, there are no restrictions on who can publish (so long as they pay the fee) and anyone can read the information and utilize it freely without restrictions. Discovery rights expire much faster than other scientific rights, maybe e.g. in a year or so.

This generates an entirely new business model for scientific explorers. It actually becomes profitable to generate new news-worthy scientific discoveries. Many of the companies who today try to protect their inventions by patents will instead live from making headlines.

In general this finally brings market forces into science. Science has been rotting away, especially in the last century resulting in such junk science as the current climate change scare. But not only that, many of the people who today are forced to either choose copyright or patents to protect their intellectual work will now find an array of possible property rights that are more suitable for their kind of model.

To a libertarian anti-IP person this sounds like complete tyranny. Since science is of zero value to humans (it's non-material) it is a major violation to protect scientific property rights.

I have discussed extensively for many hours with self-proclaimed stalinist marxists and this argument of yours is IDENTICAL to theirs. This is the Marxist theory of value. They claim that intellectual work is "a precondition" or "a needed input" as you say, but that the actual value comes from physical labor and ONLY the physical labor. In other words you are indeed an information Marxist, as I have stated all along.

Property can be defined as things that are OWNED, i.e. wielded SOVEREIGNTY over by an owner. It says nothing about whether that property is physical or what not. In fact, over the centuries various things have been proclaimed as property that we today consider alien. Take slavery. People were indeed property. A slave proponent could argue that you should leave his property alone and that the term property is already taken. In a rational world that's not how things work.

No, YOU are claiming that physical property should be considered as legitimate property.[/quote]

Even you will admit that physical property should be considered legitimate. If you disagree then please tell me where you live so I can collect your things. However, since you aren't claiming IP as legitimate then this discussion is over since there's nothing for me to argue against. 


That's just one long assertion. Why should you own the ideas that you think up?


Why does anyone owe your intellectual work protection?

Mind workers create something of value but to regulate life and its many aspects in the name of paying their supposed dues isn't the way to go about it. That's all that I am arguing.

That's what Marxists say about physical property too.

Here's the real question:

Does enforcing the existence of intellectual property help individual happiness and prosperity?

This where it all falls apart. The definition of intellectual labor is only held up by subjective whims and desires.