Thomas Jefferson on Intellectual Property

"It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions and not merely for their own lives but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even a hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By a universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea."

(Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813)

This brings up a couple of points.

Before the state inserted intellectual property rights, the state maintained "patents" in the form of monopolies of another sort.  The idea was customers belonged to a business.  If someone opens a tavern for a group of customers, those customers belong to that tavern, and no one else could open a tavern to compete, since competition is bad.  Read the 18th Century law on this, by Horwitz.



The one aspect of Hong Kong that sticks in the craw is that the state owns the land, there is no private ownership of land, except by rights conveyed through a lease.  The only exception to this is the Church of England Cathedral for whom an inalienable right for perpetuity is recognized.

Although the idea of state ownership is anathema, it seems to more accurately reflect natural law inasmuch as land is your as long as you use it.  In capitalism, land can be aggregated, even unused, and by positive law kept in perpetuity through legal fictions such as trusts, etc.  In Hong Kong, use it or lose it.

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