Intellectual Property. Ethical Economics

Abstract

The World Summit on Information Society describes the current and future practices concerning intellectual property [as being] among most fundamental issues shaping [i]nformation [s]ociety.1 In this paper, I wish to review some of economic ethical issues specifically relevant to that class of property we refer to as distinctly intellectual. This class of property is di[double dagger]cult to compare to other property classes. There is a substantial gray area between private and communal property particularly in realms of production and ownership of of human thought. Yet intellectual property is indeed a class of property in our current legal/economic system. From societal perspective, central consideration in application of a system of economics is determination of [w]hat sort of social system would be most likely to assure growing opportunities for truly human living in business and industry.2 Achieving this goal in realm of promoting growth of scholarship in then new nation was intent of wording of Article I, Section 8 of United States Constitution:To promote Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries....The state is deeply implicated in subverting its own intention as declared in its foundational document. The evolution of American intellectual property regulation (and that of rest of world as we continually export our legal approaches to intellectual property) founded on this clause and its relationship to ethical considerations in intellectual property assignment is a highly complex one.Intellectual activity and its products cannot directly translate into capital in less complex ways physical, material objects produced from physical labor can. Thomas Je∂erson, as first American Commissioner of Patents, also made distinction between intellectual and material production: nature has made one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property... it is action of thinking power called an idea3 (Je∂erson as quoted by Rowe). Rowe o∂ers this modern interpretation: money and you have less; share an idea and you still have it, and more.4 Thought is a renewable, self-propagating resource that emerges mostly from interaction of elements (human and other) of our collective society. This notion, that individual takes raw material and, through introduction of labor, produces a distinct object that is an amalgam of those raw materials becomes much more opaque when applied to a postmodern notion of how individual evolves within a society and thinks and produces thought. Postmodernism does not have a sacrosanct view of individual against (nor in opposition to) world. I would summarize postmodern human to be characterized as a sequence of emergent properties at intersection of multidimensional points of specific times and places. If one is to take this view of individual, how can one know where intellectual property of individual is divisible from that of collective? How can we apply an Adam Smithian notion of a division of labor (or a Weberian notion of emergence of modern capitalism from a rational organization of labor) to production of ideas in same way we apply this notion to production of physical capital? Intellectual property modes of exchange in current economy reflect a notion of individual producing atomistically quantifiable intellectual capital within what is most accurately economically measurable as a vacuum. This is a highly modernist, solipsistic view of how intellectual ideas are actually produced within society. Our current processes of economic exchange of ideas seem to be based on an assumption that from insulated individual arises these encapsulated, individuated packages of intellectual (private) property. …