Why intellectual property is such a confusing concept

An article explaining the practical reasons behind the concept of material property and lack of such behind the concept of intellectual property.

What's interesting about basic concepts in our world is that they are so basic, in many cases we forget what they are and most importantly - why they are.

Such a basic concept is property. Let us explore what it is and later why this concept is so important for our society by looking at a simple situation.

The necessity of the concept comes from material objects having an important characteristic - scarcity. What this means is that the amount of material objects in any environment is always limited. And because of that, possession of such objects cannot be an unlimited commodity - both in sense of the amount of individual possessors and in the amount of simultaneous possessors. And so 'property' is a concept which links an individual to the object and makes this individual an 'owner' of that object. That means that this individual is granted a special right to use that object in any way he wants. Rules which define ownership differ in various countries, cultures and historical settings. In the animal world the concept or property also exists and its rules are usually defined by force.

It is important to note that if in any given environment the amount of certain objects is much larger than the amount of individuals that require it, the concept of property concerning this exact object may become less important to the point of being totally irrelevant. A good example of this is air which in most cases can be considered redundant.

However, because no material bodies can be absolutely redundant, the relevance of the concept of property is always situation dependent. Underwater or in space air is very much scarce and can be regarded through the prism of property with absolutely no contradiction.

So we can see that the concept of property is not an artificial concept, but a necessary one, something that naturally comes from what things are, from the basic characteristics of matter. And so it cannot be dropped or ignored and has always got to be dealt with.

A civilized concept of property in a human society is a sort of a layer that sits on top of the basic, rough necessity with which we are confronted in the material world. This layer is defined by rules which define owners and the goal of these rules is to find compromises in a continuous conflict of property.

In the world of pure ideas the situation is significantly different. Difference is in the nature of ideas, namely - ideas do not possess the characteristic of scarcity. In other words, an idea can be used any amount of times and by any amount of people without "running out". Basically, an idea in itself has no quantity parameter so in any given environment an idea cannot be scarce. To possess an idea means to be simply exposed to it. All of this comes from the simple fact that ideas are not material objects and are thus not bound by limitations of matter. And so the only conclusion that can be made is that in the world of pure ideas the concept of property is truly and absolutely irrelevant.

However, for most of the human history ideas typically required a material carrier in order to be preserved and distributed. For instance, a story had to be written on paper, a music recording had to be recorded on tape or disc or also written down on paper. In ancient times it was more typical for people themselves to be carriers of ideas. Material carriers are always scarce and so for a while there was a necessity link between ideas and material objects. During that time it was easy to tie up quantity, a material characteristic, to ideas through their carriers. It was also fairly easy to tie up the concept of property which granted rights to groups of people on the distribution and possession of material carriers of ideas.

In the XX century the situation drastically changed with the invention and integration of computer technology into everyday life. What computer technology did was make material carriers redundant, for the most part.

The main carrier of ideas within computer technology is a digital file. It is also material, however, in order to be produced, distributed, copied and stored it requires so little effort and resources that it can be considered relatively non-absolutely redundant in situations when computer technology is readily available. Of course, the larger the size of the file, the more "material" it gets and the less redundant it becomes. Very large files require a lot of digital space which in turn would require material carriers in form of hard drives and discs, filling up most or significant amount of space on them, while smaller files can be stored within a single hard drive in very large quantities.

The development of computer technology, however, continues to increase the relative redundancy of material carriers of ideas, thus continuing to make the link between material objects and ideas weaker. With this process going on, it becomes increasingly difficult, to the point of impossibility, to tie the concepts of quantity, property and other material characteristics to ideas. Because these ties became important through the course of human activities for many individuals and groups of individuals, the thawing of these ties creates difficulties and property conflicts in various fields.

Having examined the basics of property relative to material objects and ideas, we can now look at the concept of "intellectual property".

"Intellectual property" is a concept that treats ideas as material objects, implying that ideas are scarce. All entities that can be characterized as scarce can be treated as property and thus can have owners.

The definition of "intellectual property" is actually self-explanatory as to why the concept is confusing. The analysis we made earlier shows that an implication that ideas are scarce is not true. In fact, while technology can make certain material objects relatively redundant, ideas themselves possess absolute redundancy. And thus an attempt to treat redundant entities as scarce will always be artificial.

Such artificial nature of "intellectual property" is naturally confusing due to its ongoing contradiction with the way things are in reality around us. Saying that ideas can be property is in essence the same as saying that 2 is 3. And because 2 is not 3, requiring to artificially consider 2 same as 3 would require constant enforcement simply because in truth 2 is not 3 and reality, the way things are, would continuously be in conflict with the erroneous assumption. It also cannot be a long running concept as human societies tend to preserve only those concepts which are necessary for the society to function - concepts based on necessity are the ones that pass the test of time.