However, there is still a need for Trademarks – even in a Libertarian Utopia.

While McDonalds, just makes burgers, its not the burgers that people are wanting to buy, its a McDonalds Quarter pounder. While there is nothing wrong with also selling burgers, and maybe calling them a quarter pounder, there should be a protection in place to stop me calling it a McDonalds, or MacDonalds or whatever.
This is not about IP.

Hopefully people arguing in this debate understand the difference – however, I sometimes wonder!

If I steal your computer, then you don’t have one any more, and so although I benefit, you’re being harmed against your will.

But if I make a computer that’s a copy of yours, then you still have one and so do I, so nobody’s being harmed against their will.

The problem is, in the absence of copyright and patent laws, Steve Jobs may not bother spending hundreds of millions of dollars on developing an awesome computer, because I might copy it [works better for software, obviously – I think $generic_Chinese_cloner would struggle to make a facsimile MacBook Air).

So, to encourage him to develop awesome computers, we say “if someone invents excellent stuff, then the government will grant them a monopoly on selling said expensive stuff for a certain time period, and people who choose to arrange their physical property in a way that breaks that monopoly will be punished in the courts”.

The IP lobby say that the right to stop people from copying their ideas is ‘property’, and that breaking their monopoly is ‘theft’ – but they’re lying.

I’ll admit to having some problems with IP. I mean, how is it considered wrong to steal a computer, but not wrong to steal the ideas that made it possible to manufacture that computer?

DK