Against Intellectual Monopoly

lawsuits.... The principle of the law
from which such consequences flow cannot be just.'
    These are, as we have come to learn during the century and a half in between,
exactly the effects of intellectual "property."
    A critical confusion in the case of ideas is the difference between an
abstract idea and a concrete copy of it.5 Owning an abstract idea means that
you have the right to control all copies of that idea; owning a copy of an
idea means that you have the right to control only the copy of that idea.
We favor the latter but not the former right of property. The geometric
idea of a circle and Piccadilly Circle are not the same thing, and it does not
follow that if ownership of the second is good, so is ownership of the first.
This is not some metaphysical quibble about Plato being right and George
Berkeley being wrong, or about which came first the idea, the egg, or its
implementation, the chicken. Quite the opposite, the difference is practical,
economically relevant, and a matter of mere common sense.
    Take, for example, the idea of antigravity. Imagine that you have just
figured out how to reverse gravity. An embodiment of this abstract idea
now exists in your mind. It has economic value: you can use it to construct
flying saucers or you can teach it to other people interested in traveling
to Mars. From an economic viewpoint, your knowledge of antigravity is
as much a private good as the chair upon which you are sitting. In fact,
your copy of antigravity is even more private than your chair. If you died
without writing down or telling anyone of your idea, it would be as if your
idea of antigravity had never been conceived, while your chair will probably
survive you. If, on the other hand, you communicate your idea to me, then
my copy of the idea of antigravity leads an existence entirely independent of
your copy. You teaching me how antigravity works is a production process
through which your idea, your time, and my time produce as output my
knowledge ofantigravity. Ifyou were to die, my copy of the idea of antigravity
would continue to exist and would be at least just as useful as it would have
been had you remained alive. My copy of the idea of antigravity possesses,
therefore, economic value. Similarly, your copy of the idea of antigravity
also possesses economic value.

    By way of contrast, abstract, disembodied ideas have no value. Borges
makes this point clear in his short story "The Library of Babel." "When it
was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression
was one of extravagant happiness." But, of course, it is the embodied copies
of ideas that have economic value, not their abstract existence, so, "As
was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression.
The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and
that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable."6
Abstract ideas not yet embodied in someone or something are like the books
in "The Library of Babel," socially useless because they are inaccessible. My
working knowledge of antigravity or a textbook explaining antigravity have
economic value, but the abstract idea has no value.
    This may sound like we are making up unrealistic examples to build straw
men that can easily catch fire. Nothing is further from truth. Consider the
following discussion of some of the theoretical implications of the 1714-73
saga of John Harrison, his clocks, and the Board of Longitude prize.
    What Parliament had solicited was knowledge. What it got were four clocks, all
different. Compare Harrison's clocks with the astronomical algorithm that the
board had hoped for. Such an algorithm did, in fact, materialize. The so-called
lunar method used observations of distance between the moon and the stars to
infer longitude. The lunar method had the essential feature of a pure public good:
the tables that linked the observations to longitude were costly to compile in the
first place, involving countless calculations, but once this was done, anyone could
use the template at only the additional cost of owning the tables. The knowledge
was nonrival.7
    Was it? A nonrival, pure, public good means that we can all make use of the
same knowledge without interfering with one another. Which knowledge
was nonrival here? The clocks were certainly not, and the tables embodying
the calculations were not either. If I were to take your clock or your