Scarcity can be defined as the
ownership of something tangible which necessarily excludes others
from using it. Thus, if I own a fork, I exclude others from using it,
unless I either give it away or temporarily transfer availability of
it to someone else, which in turn means I cannot at that point in
time use it. Should someone steal it from me, the act of theft can be
characterised by two features. First, the transfer of property is
involuntary on the part of the original owner, and does not involve
mutual consent. Second, the transfer of ownership excludes the
previous owner from using the property – that is to say, if someone
steals my fork, I can no longer use it.
Intellectual property, on the other
hand, is not a scarce resource. If I see you making a sandwich and
decide to make one myself using my own bread and cheese, I am not
taking away your idea from you – you still have possession of your
idea. When I make a sandwich based on your idea, you do not lose your
own ability to make a sandwich. Ideas themselves are therefore not in
principle scarce economic goods. Having said that, you could
certainly create artificial scarcity by hiding your idea of making a
sandwich from me, and thus try to imbue your idea with added value
due to its newly acquired scarcity. Such means of protecting ones'
ideas are in my opinion perfectly valid.
If however you were to try to stop me
from making my own sandwich once I had already acquired the idea, you
would be violating my very real physical property rights. You would
in fact be restricting the ways in which I can use my physical
property (bread and cheese), and in so doing would also be laying
claim to ideas inside my mind, violating my self-ownership too. This
contradiction between self ownership and physical property rights on
the one hand and intellectual property rights on the other cannot
logically be valid, since intellectual property rights can only come
about as a consequence of self-ownership and physical property
rights. You must first own yourself, in order to own your ideas. Of course, there is nothing stopping
you from getting me to voluntarily sign a contract agreeing to not
disclose your idea to others, or to use it in limited ways, but such
a contract must be explicit, and signed by both parties.
If one were to assert that the copying
of another's idea, and its subsequent mass production is damaging the
owner of the original idea, then using that same logic, if two people
were to try to get a job where only one placement exists, the person
who gets the job should be held liable for hurting the other person.
But this reductio ad absurdum works precisely because there is a
critical misconception here. In the case of a job, what is lost is
not owned. In other words, the person who fails to pass an interview
for a job does not lose the job itself, but merely the opportunity
of obtaining this job. Since opportunities are not one's property,
indeed – opportunities are usually created by others for us to take
advantage of, then the loss of an opportunity as a result of someone
else does not constitute a crime. To try to instate a system as to
the contrary would require violation of the rights of the employers
and other creators of opportunity. Oh wait...
In any case, it is
scarcity that makes property rights both necessary for a
well-functioning society that wishes to avoid the perennial tragedy
of the commons problem, and it is scarcity that provides the ethical
justification for property rights and against theft, since theft of
scarce resources actually does hurt the original owner – by
excluding them from their possessions.
Likewise
then, we can apply this to piracy. Let us take, for example, movie
piracy. If I were to download a movie from the internet (assuming I
did not explicitly and voluntarily sign a contract with the producer
restricting my use of the product), and then sell DVDs of this movie
to other people at a lower price than the original DVD producer was
selling them at – this does not represent theft. The loss of sales
that the original producer experiences is not
a loss of property, and so cannot possibly constitute theft. This is
because all sales are opportunities – they may or may not occur,
and when I undercut the original DVD producer therefore taking
customers away from them, this is merely a manifestation of market
mechanics in which they fail to price their goods adequately (usually
due to monopoly power) or fail to protect their ideas through
non-coercive means, and therefore lose the opportunity to sell their
goods to some people. Thus, intellectual property can only be
safeguarded through secrecy or explicit contracts with the users of
said property, if it is to remain consistent with the idea of
self-ownership.
It is also worth
addressing the argument that actually, ideas are scarce. It is
claimed that ideas have scarcity because it is difficult and costly
to obtain certain knowledge, skills, experience, etc. Take the
example of teaching. To acquire an education implies a certain
expense, regardless of who pays for it. Yet this is primarily because
teachers are often scarce – especially good teachers, and both
teachers and the act of teaching constitute a physical good or action
in the real world. Moreover, it is the teachers' constraint of time,
and the limited amount of teachers, that does not enable them to
spread their ideas more freely. It is thus the natural limitations of
the physical world that cause the transmission of ideas to be scarce
– not the ideas themselves.