The Labor Theory of IP?

Since labor alone doesn’t create value if it’s not used to produce what people choose to subjectively value [verb], then we might likewise ask how can labor alone create a property claim as IP advocates often seem to imply?

It can’t.

Property is a claim to that which is scarce. It doesn’t matter how much work you did to produce something — once it’s created as an item of information, it’s not naturally scarce anymore with todays information transfer/duplication technology. In similar manner, flailing my arms about as “labor” doesn’t create a claim to the not-particularly scarce air that I pass through. This despite calories being expended and despite breathing being vitally important and “valued” — because the air is, for the most part, not scarce.

J. Neil Schulman, who advocates his own version of IP that he calls “logorights“, responded on Facebook that:

“Value does not derive from labor; existence as a newly created real object does.”

To clarify, Neil regards a created, distinct, identifiable item of information as a “thing”. I’m mostly not inclined to quibble with him about that because what matters is that it’s not a naturally scarce thing.

Neil continued:

“…a new and unique thing which can be distinguished from all other things is scarce by virtue of its uniqueness.”

Not quite! With current information duplication/transfer technology, an item of information is pretty much ONLY (naturally) scarce PRIOR to the point of creation (leaving aside, for purposes of discussion, closely guarded secrets).

But Neil disagrees with my characterization of items of information as not particularly scarce.

“That its scarceness is horizontal rather than vertical is beside the point; all property rights are with respect to things that have ways in which they are unbounded.”

Above, Neil is elaborating on his already stated notion that the uniqueness of a particular item of information is a type of scarcity. That notion, though, conflates the concepts “distinct” and “scarce”. The atmosphere and the ocean are (at the scale of an individual, anyway, leaving aside large scale issues for purposes of this example) not scarce. They are, however, distinct. Distinctness is not scarcity. That the air is not the ocean does not mean I can flail my arms about to create a claim to the not-particularly scarce air around me that would allow me to charge you a toll for passing through “my air”.

We can say “property” in that which is scarce matters because it serves as a metaphorical container for labor as an aspect of its scarcity.

That is, it is wrong to forcibly take a scarce item from someone who has made it theirs via their labor (or which was gifted or exchanged to them from those who had a labor-derived original claim). To take a scarce item from someone that their own or exchanged labor brought into their possession is to take their labor from them against their will — to enslave them.

After the point of creation, duplicating an item of already created information does not remove it from the enjoyment of any other possessor — because it’s not scarce. The duplicator has not stolen from or enslaved anyone. No labor has been stolen because the labor has not been “contained” in a scarce item in the first place. No property claim, in any ethical understanding of the term “property”, has been created.