“Intellectual Property” law is not an Inherent Natural Law

“Intellectual Property” law is not an inherent natural law, it is a “product” of human design, it wasn’t here “before the beginning of time” like property was and we just had to articulate it and write it down as a law. Unlike real physical property law, it was designed by a few people and then forced upon the rest of us.

The fact is that property exist even among animals, they can’t articulate (they can’t talk) they certainly can’t understand it, but try to take something away from a dog… he will defend it because it is his property. The same was true for us. Before we evolved into homo sapiens, our ancestors started to live in groups (the predecessor of society) and they couldn’t speak, they couldn’t articulate their “thoughts”, but they already had the concept of property because that was the only way to achieve a peaceful coexistence. If something was scarce and rivalrous, it was a designated an owner and it was shared only under the “blessings” of this owner and that it can be exchanged for other property and they did this even though they didn’t understand any of the concepts behind their actions.

We consider theft a crime, not because of the “ten commandments”, not because the “people who wrote the law” said it shall be like this, but because it was a law long before we could articulate such a thing as law much less write it down on paper. This is why we tolerate and (most of us) accept the confiscation of unlawfully obtained property because it doesn’t disrupt the peace it actually makes the peace more stable.

This is why the majority of the internet does not accept “Intellectual Property” (even though they say they do), this is why there are so many “thieves” out there downloading music, movies, books, software. These people are doing it because they “know” it does not disrupt the peace, they “know” it is something we can do without injuring another individual, and if we injure nobody then we are not disrupting the spontaneous order and consequently we are not disrupting the peace.

When a large majority of the population doesn’t care for some “law” and/or they care about it only because of severe punishments, it is not law at all, it is just some bad and counterproductive command from the “authorities” forced on us in order to serve the interests of some groups at the expense of other groups. Real laws are those respected by the large majority even without the threat of punishment from the government – only a small minority (the criminals) need to be forced to respect a real law, that is why we call it law, because the large majority “know” it emerged in order to save the peace, not designed in order to serve somebodies interest.