A generation ago, or maybe it is two now, computer programmers tended to be open source friendly and not such big fans of IP. Code was for sharing and innovation was in no short supply on account of this. It's only since IP in technology became the basis for a gold rush that the tide has turned in favor it IP. Meanwhile, precious few of the patents and copyrights filed wind up being held and profited from by the people who did the innovating.

We have both IP and the open source sharing model at work in our society, sometimes working in tandem. If we are worried about incentivizing innovation as the utilitarian would be, its worth comparing track records. Most of the things we use computers for can be done with non-proprietary software. It is mainly convenience and support we are willing to pay for so licencing agreements for standard utilities are little more than a formality. But look beyond IT to science and basic research in technology, medicine, urban design etc. It's all copyleft. The sharing model has been far and away the more productive way to harness and deploy the power of innovation. It has been for all of human history up until recently and it remains the dominant model even with the paint-over of IP. A fairly standard recipe for IP based start ups in IT and biotech is for some young innovator to do his best creative work in the context of not for profit university research labs, then apply for a patent and seek venture capital only once the path to a marketable product is cleared and nearly paved. Even with intellectual property rights, the foundation, plumbing and framing of innovation gets done outside the IP model and things go proprietary only in the final stages of bringing a product to market.

I can see how IP is going to be essential to providing incentives for the production of block buster movies and such. But people have and share good ideas routinely even in our IP based economy. The person who gets rich of the IP is more likely to be the person with access to venture capital than the first person to come up with the great idea. We could talk about Facebook here. Zuckerberg is famously alleged to have stolen the basic idea behind Facebook. Whether this happened or not, there were 1000s of computer enthusiasts with imaginations ablaze over platforms like FB across the country 20 years ago. The possibilities were not lost on those paying attention. It's not just some grand coincidence that the person who founded FB came from Harvard, where connections to investment capital abound.

Now concerning the labor/desert line. Let's consider one simple scenario. Suppose I lived a thousand years or so ago and I invented the hoe. My neighbors are quite impressed with this back saving farm implement. A few of them fashion their own. Have these neighbors taken something from met.

Something that I own? Am I somehow deprived as a result? How could that be. I still have my hoe and it helps me produce a good crop without breaking my back. I'm well fed as a result of my innovation. What cost is there to me if my neighbors get well fed too? The idea that a person is deprived of something they can rightly call property when another makes use of their good idea seems like a non-starter here. How did we come to think differently about this?