Considering that I'm not an english native speaker, some parts of the text might contain incorrect or inappropriate grammar constructions or words usage.
In this article I'd like to address two big sources with the pretentious purpose of functioning as a complement to those thoughts. The first honorable mention is the Lysander Spooner's book on Intellectual Property in which the author establish the ground of the Intellectual property as a matter of fact and also as a matter of rule (avoiding Hume's Razor), see the reference here, however after reading this book, I became disapointed with the way things were promising in the beggining and then got, specially with the nice arguments that make a distinction between property as a material thing and idea property as something that is restricted to ones minds (and being the kind that matter the most).
Things got twisted when Spooner tries to solve an hypothetical problem of "a book that is sold and contains instructions on building a machine". He argues in favor of preventing someone that has purchased the book and proceed to building the machine (a machine that has been idealized and built by the book's author before), stating that purchasing a book doesn't give you a legitimate ownership of the author's idea, and that it would be an aggression to the first owner of the idea. Here is the relevant excerpt:
I shall offer an answer to this question, by attempting to prove, what seems almost too nearly self-evident to need to be proved, viz.: That a book, and the ideas it describes, are, in fact, and in law, distinct commodities; and that an unqualified sale of the book does not, therefore, of itself alone, imply any sale whatever of the ideas it describes, nor the conveyance of any right whatever to the use of those ideas.
At this point of the issue, Spooner leads his thought to a mistake with regards to the object of an exchange. For some reason, in the beginning of the book, Spooner argues that the enjoyment of a property refers to the immaterial aspects of the owned object because the physical stuff is of minor value to the user while the utility itself is an object of the mind. Thus we can understand that as a matter of fact there are properties of the intellect that refers to the objects giving them value rates due to the intellectual property it translates to. Later Spooner provides the deduction of the law of property under the natural law as he understand that the object and the idea behind the object are two different things and so, purchasing the object does not gives you possession of the idea. While this proposition is correct, it is also clear that the object is a mean to pursuit an idea.
I will try to synthetize the definitions and axioms used by Spooner and lead to a different outcome about Intellectual Property.
We can think of idea as a property of someone in three ways:
I1) Anyone who has possession over an idea has it in his mind and it can not be passed to another's mind;
I2) Anyone who has possession of an idea can share this idea by replicating the same idea;
I3) Nobody has complete possession of ideas as the ideas are the perfect conceptions (in a more platonic sense) and we can only have partial or "shadow" ideas about the "real" ones.
Instead of choosing any of this premises I'll rather try to apply the same thought to each of them.
Following the 'purchased book' example provided in the previous block, I think that, as Spooner seems to agree, information can be sold and bought not only in fact but also in right, and when someone buys a paper with some notes, or a txt file, the real object of interest is neither the paper nor the digital file, but the information it contains, which can be translated further to ideas. Which suggests that buying the book {as this one below} also means that you just has acquired a way of conceiving the idea behind the phrases and graphics. And, in case you haven't bought the book, it is not impossible to conceive the same idea from scratch, which gives you no less right to use the idea than another one who did the same, only because the other did first. Also, considering that you just bought information on how to conceive the idea of the machine, shouldn't you also have the right to reproduce, build and use the machine for personal profits?
How could be the case that the two ideas, of the author and of the buyer of the book, to be the same? Are they only two alike ideas, or two instances of the same idea? I think both, they are two alike concepts of one common idea, as in two alike puzzle games that compounds the image of the same object (in this analogy each puzzle is an idea or another compound of ideas), but it is always more or less imperfect with regards to the object itself. But the way you choose to think about it is not enough to establish how IP fits into natural law. What is really important to define is: What are the criterias according to which we can objectively point which of the possible scenarios of building something that has been previously created by others, are justified by law? Well, as a voluntaryist, I think that the will and the understanding of the involved parts are sufficient to turn the 'ethos' relation into a justified one under the natural law, for which I might provide a deductive reason or syllogism in another post. Assuming this premise, it follows that, when the effects of one’s act does not consists in a restriction or imposition against another's liberty there can’t be any dispute or litigious meaning a inherently justified relation (with liberty I mean the capability of act according to the will - While you are always free to try, also yo could be obstructed to achieve something by the circumstances generated as effects of someone's actions, which consists in coercion).
Until now, the IP as a law seems to be a fiction, however, the hypothetical example does not consider another variable, which is, the authorship credit of the machine. Can the book purchaser claim to be the author of the machine? it sounds absurd, except if he claims to be the author of his particular machine, instead of the idea of the machine. So the IP shouldn't be considered fiction when applied to authorship, authorship can not be sold it is a recognition of a fact that enhance the credit of an idea to the factual author. Which means that IP could generate disputes and litigious, not because of the use of an idea, but because of a dispute with regards to the determination of the truth between two or more authorship claims against each other. Using a fake authorship consists in fraud, which is a crime because it modifies the object of consent that justifies the relationship, turning the voluntary agreement in a void, because they are agreeeing to with a fake object.
