Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 33: Intellectual Property Rights

Don't steal this article's intellectual property! :)

Intellectual property rights offer another illuminating example of a case in which utilitarianism outshines its rivals at providing the philosophical basis for a widely accepted concept.  Intellectual property rights are the types of property rights involved in copyright and patent law, wherein people have control over how their ideas are used.  Utilitarianism provides a very natural explanation of why people would have rights to their ideas.  Giving people control over how their ideas are used makes it more profitable to have new, important ideas, by making them harder to steal, which spurs important and sometimes life-saving innovation.  

In fact, utilitarianism explains quite simply why it makes sense to have the type of intellectual property rights law that we do.  There are two competing roles for intellectual property rights law.  The first is making it profitable to innovate, creating incentives for people to innovate in the future.  The second opposite role is making the innovations accessible.  If patents last too long, the price of the innovated goods will be too high for too long, resulting in people not purchasing the patented good.  This is the basic reason why monopolies are inefficient.  

Our current system, which seems at least potentially just, is that patents are had for a limited period of time before they expire.  This is hard to reconcile with the notion of rights.  Surely there’s no fact of the matter about how long one deserves intellectual property for an invention--which happens to be 20 years.  It seems like deontological accounts would have to be all or nothing.  Either people deserve indefinite property rights--a conclusion which is deeply unintuitive--or they deserve no property rights, which is also deeply unintuitive.  

Virtue ethics also seems out of place here.  Is there really some robust, virtue based account of what length of time intellectual property rights should last?  It’s not clear what the account would look like.  Thus, intellectual property rights are another case that fits most neatly into a utilitarian conception.  

When analyzed, it is hard to find a non-consequentialist justification for making it illegal for people to copy down the written statements of a person. There isn’t a clear non-legal sense in which one’s statements are their property. Yet utilitarianism explains why it makes sense to treat intellectual property as property.

There’s a reason why lots of libertarians have hang-ups about intellectual property rights. It just turns out that intellectual property rights are not very easy to justify, absent appealing to consequences. This makes them a great example of something consequentialism explains better than its rivals.