Running from the law the press and the parents, is your name Michael Diamond?
The intentional torts of trespass against land and chattels, and the underlying property interests which they protect, are surely a foundation of any legal system that supports the private production of goods and services. The prevalence of these causes of action against theft—technically, involuntary transfers—even prior to the earliest development of common law legal systems supports this intuition.
But the trespass tort and its related causes of action presuppose a common set of normative expectations that identifies the set of goods to which the underling theft prohibition applies. If there were no widely obeyed norm against trespass of land and conversion of property, it would be exceedingly costly to enforce the formal laws against it, or in the absence of supplemental state enforcement, to undertake self-help measures to do so. That consensus may appear to be well-settled with respect to real property (my house) and most forms of tangible property (my car). That normative consensus tracks a positive consensus. Despite periodic intellectual fashions to the contrary, empirical evidence is clear that secure property rights are a critical ingredient in economic growth. (…)
However, any such consensus is often unsettled with respect to intangible goods—ideas and the various technologies and forms of expression in which those ideas are embodied—and, especially, to the set of creative goods protected by copyright. There are more than a handful of serious commentators who refuse to extend, or decline to presumptively extend, the empirically-grounded logic behind property rights in land and tangible assets to property rights in ideas, forms of expression and other intangible assets.
{ Jonathan M. Barnett, What’s So Bad About Stealing? | SSRN | Continue reading }
photo { Doug DuBois }
