By: Samir Chopra
Rarely, if ever, does the term 'intellectual property' add clarity to any debate of substance–very often, this is because it includes the term 'property' and thus offers an invitation to some dubious theorizing. This post by Alex Rosenberg at Daily Nous is a good example of this claim:
Locke famously offered an account of the justification of private property, one that Nozick brought to our attention in Anarchy, State and Utopia. The account worked like this: morally permissible private property begins with original acquisition, and that happens when you mix your labor with nature, and leave as good and as much for others. Alas, this “Lockean” proviso is impossible to satisfy. Or at least it is in every original acquisition other than the case of intellectual property. Here one mixes one mental labor with nature—empirical facts about reality, including social reality. Since there are an infinite number of good ideas, the creator of intellectual property leaves as much and as good for others, and therefore has an unqualified right to what he has created.
Brian Leiter’s ownership of the PGR satisfies the most stringent test of private property I know. It’s his creation and he excluded no one else from mixing his or her labor with nature to produce a substitute for or for that matter a complement to his creation.
In light of this fact, the effort to separate him from his intellectual property owing to disapproval of his emails and posts seems rather preposterous.
It has often been proposed–most notably by Richard Stallman, free software's most fiery proponent-that the term 'intellectual property' be junked in favor of more precise usage. That is, when you are tempted to use the term 'intellectual property' use 'copyright,' 'patents,' 'trademarks,' or 'trade secrets' instead. Doing this would enable immediate grappling with the precise nature of the issue at hand–in each named domain there are separable legal and policy issues at play.
For instance, the granting of copyright is not the recognition of an abstract property right. It is a utilitarian policy decision–to allow the collection of monopoly rent for a limited period of time–with a very specific objective in mind: the creation of more artistic works. If someone's copyright rights have allegedly been violated, we may begin by trying to identify the concrete expression that was supposedly copyrightable, the identification of the nature of the infringement–unauthorized reproduction or the production of derivative works–and so on. Incidentally, matters become a tad confusing because Rosenberg talks about 'mixing mental labor with nature.' Locke did not have 'nature' in mind, rather he had in mind fallow land. Which is precisely not the nature of artistic creation, where the creator does not interact with 'fallow land' but mixes his ideas with the ideas of others to create a new work.
In the case of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, it relies for its content on the availability of a great deal of openly available material; collation, processing, and analysis turns this into a new work–the PGR, the new concrete expression. There is indeed a copyright in the particular concrete expression of the PGR–the individual blog pages and the material in them–its author's commentaries, analysis, and summaries. The unauthorized copying of the content of these is indeed prohibited, as is the production of derivative works–for instance, an unauthorized abridgment of his explanation of the rankings. But the current proposals aimed at changing the 'management' of the PGR aim to do nothing this sort. Prof. Leiter's concrete expressions–the current content of the PGR–remain his; he could continue to produce them, retain his copyright, and proceed as before. And indeed, an entirely new set of rankings may be produced, using the same 'raw material' available to the current authors of the PGR, subjected to new analysis and commentary, and thus resulting in a new concrete expression, a new set of rankings. Also copyrightable.
Analytic philosophers–who are so proud of their claims to provide conceptual clarity–shouldn't continue to traffic in a term as obfuscatory as 'intellectual property.'
Note: This post was originally published–under the same title--at samirchopra.com.
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