Cristian Timmermann

Intellectual property typically involves claims of ownership of types, rather than particulars. In this article I argue that this difference in ontology makes an important moral difference. In particular I argue that there cannot be an intrinsic moral right to own intellectual property. I begin by establishing a necessary condition for the justification of intrinsic moral rights claims, which I call the Rights Justification Principle. Briefly, this holds that if we want to claim that there is an intrinsic moral right to φ, we must be able to show that (a) violating this right would typically result in either a wrongful harm or other significant wrong to the holder of the right, and (b) the wrongful harm or other wrong in question is independent of the existence of the intrinsic right we are trying to justify. I then argue that merely creating a new instance of a type is not the kind of action which can wrongfully harm the creator of that type. Insofar as there do seem to be wrongs involved in copying a published poem or computer program, these wrongs presuppose the existence of an intrinsic right to own intellectual property, and so cannot be used to justify it. I conclude that there cannot be an intrinsic right to own intellectual property.

This article identifies ‘the tragedy of the commons’ as an essentially aggregative harm and considers what agents in such a scenario owe to one another. It proposes that the duty to take reasonable precautions requires that agents make efforts to establish collective solutions to any essentially aggregative harm to which they would otherwise contribute. Baylor Johnson has argued that the general obligation to promote the common good requires that agents make efforts to establish a collective agreement to avert a potential tragedy of the commons. This article agrees with Johnson's analysis but argues that there are also negative duties, which give commons users additional moral reason to take collective action to prevent the destruction of the utility of the commons. These duties link commons users to resolving this particular problem and provide grounds to demand that they make greater efforts to prevent the destruction of the commons compared to bystanders. The article suggests that fulfilling negative duties can require establishing collective institutions with the power to regulate human action and interaction. This analysis could be applied to a range of social problems which result from the aggregation of actions and practices