If Copyright Didn't Exist, A Free Market Would Invent It
The philosophical basis of copyright law is a travesty that is not worth going into here. The resultant statist defense of "intellectual property" is heavy handed and infected with cronyism because the philosophical basis is of such poverty. The typical libertarian response is to disavow any right, as such, to protection of intellectual property. I'd like to suggest this is an extreme response and describe how something akin to copyright is valid in a free market, libertarian society. The fundamental basis of libertarianism is private property. In this theory there can be no question that the correct and proper owner of work is the creator of that work. (A possible caveat is that all the inputs to the work were already owned by the creator - if you create a sculpture out of my marble, not only is that sculpture mine, I may have recourse against you for using the marble without my permission.) In terms of homesteading, the creator of a work has a greater claim than an...