There’s another side to this argument in my article “Informational Property — Logorights,” newly reposted at http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/2009/12/classic-j-neil-informational-property-logorights/

No one who takes property rights seriously can afford to dismiss property rights in information objects without refuting the proofs and the detailed discussion of objections I raise in this article.

Stephan Kinsella has been claiming since 1996 that he’s done so. Read it for yourself and decide whether you agree with me that he hasn’t.

“I would also caution anti-copyright libertarians against assuming their conclusion in using anti-monopoly and ‘privilege’ rhetoric against copyright. Arguments against ‘monopoly privilege’ in the exclusive ownership of a logos ignore the fundamental difference between all property rights, which are monopolistic in the sense of being held exclusively, and monopoly practices, which are invasive.” –J. Neil Schulman, “Informational Property — Logorights”, at http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/2009/12/classic-j-neil-informational-property-logorights/

The reason I argue that “any conceptually identifiable ‘thing’ is ownable” — although I never put it that way — is that without identity differentiating things nothing could be ownable.

The reason that creation is the beginning of the moral case for property rights is that without creation nothing other than brute-force possession defines ownership.

As for “the obvious conundrum of people coming up with the same idea” that is just one of the questions I answered 25 years ago in my essay “Informational Property: Logorights,” newly available at http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/2009/12/classic-j-neil-informational-property-logorights/.

“Creation is a Person’s action which imposes that Person’s logos on something which exists to give that thing a unique identity it did not previously have. … If the respondent succeeds in demonstrating independent creation, then the petitioner’s original “creation” wasn’t inherently improbable, therefore questionable as a unique creation — and therefore possibly not property at all — for either of them.”

If you chance upon a first edition Mark Twain, or some printings of his books, you’ll find inside near the front a trade mark he created. He used this mark to identify the work as his own, in addition to whatever passed for copyright at the time.

To this day trademarks which are accompanied by the superscript TM are regarded as trade marked at common law, much like the hallmarks of yore. The (R) symbol indicates that the trademark has been registered with the government, for some fee. Obviously, the TM is just as valid, and its prior use establishes precedent. Someone else is not allowed to register the mark that you have used with TM previously.

These are, of course, examples of how common law deals with certain patterns. There is a long history of associating a certain hallmark with a certain gold refiner. And, of course, an equally long history of counterfeit.

I thought the suffix was “-logy” My dictionary (American Heritage) has both -logy the suffix and ology the word, which it attributes to Evan Esar.

You might know Esar’s work as a humorist. One of his quips was, “Walking isn’t a lost art—one must, by some means, get to the garage.” Presumably that was (L) Evan Esar some time in the 20th Century.

If -logy were not the suffix, we could not have three of them in a trilogy, nor remember it fondly in a eulogy. I could make an analogy to paralogy or ask whether mammalogy were the study of mammals or mammaries but not if I wanted a successful brachyology.