Justifying legal protection of intellectual property

Abstract

Whether or not intellectual property rights ought, as a matter of political morality, to be protected by the law surely depends on what kinds of interests the various parties have in intellectual content. Although theorists disagree on the limits of morally legitimate lawmaking authority, this much seems obvious: the coercive power of the law should be employed only to protect interests that rise to a certain level of moral importance. We have such a significant interest in not being lied to, for example, that ordinary unilateral lies are morally wrong, but the wrongness of lying does not rise to the level of something the state should protect against by coercive criminal prohibition. Indeed, it would clearly be wrong for the law to coercively restrict behaviors in which no one has any morally significant interests (i.e., interests that are important enough from the standpoint of morality that they receive some protection from moral principles) whatsoever. Using the coercive power of the law to restrict freedom is not justified unless the moral benefits of restricting the behavior outweigh the moral costs involved in using force to restrict human autonomy and freedom.