- Property rights
Devon Erikson:
Well, first of all, the thing to understand about property rights is that for thousands of years, people have been doing this. These philosopher types, with long beards and high opinions of themselves, have been trying to rationalize where rights come from. Rights are given to us by God. Rights are inherent in every human being. All this philosophizing, which is just pages and pages of stuff, is trying to reach a conclusion that they a priori decided they wanted to reach. And anyone who looks at the universe and is really just honest with themselves, it's like there's no morality encoded on any of it. It's not carved onto every neutron. It's not there.
So, we developed this notion of property rights because we needed them. And that development of the notion of property rights actually predates not only human beings but the spinal cord. If you don't think that lower animals have some notion of property rights, then go hit a beehive with a stick and see what happens. You're not going to like it. Property rights are necessary for civilization. They are necessary for investment. They are necessary for building anything worth having because nobody is going to build anything if somebody's just going to come along and take it from them and they can't stop that.
So, what are intellectual property rights? Well, what that means is that intellectually, the idea of intellectual property rights is a technology. We don't discover it. We invent it.
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