Expanding On Christianity & Intellectual Property

A bit of googling my own blog shows me I already made the Christian Case Against Intellectual Property:

Can be summed up by pointing out that if we could make an exact copy of our food in order to feed the poor without losing anything, we would have a moral obligation to do so.

Just really think about that for a minute. A real steak, perfectly done, and infinitely copyable, with no loss to you at all if you let everyone in the entire world copy it. You, me, and anybody in the world able to eat. Now the benefit to the poor if this imaginary steak were real is strikingly clear, and Christians everywhere would be aghast at the idea that anyone would try to exert ownership over the copies of this steak quite regardless of whether or not anyone had a coherent argument for such a scheme. Charity is a virtue, after all.

Now, back to the world of ideas. Say you have a good one, and while the benefits are less tangible and immediate than a porterhouse, your idea, nonetheless does provide the holder of said idea many benefits. It may even be a specific sort of idea, one which helps the holder of the idea to get more steak whenever the idea is implemented. In any case, the idea is infinitely copyable and therefore the rule of charity applies just as well as in the case of the steak. You may be able to extract some sort of rent out of people by restricting access, but shame on you anyway.

Now the tricky little part in this equation is that there are all sorts of bad ideas out there too. Emotionally, it can be a bit hard to apply the logic and view some guy downloading the latest schlock from Hollywood with a charitable heart, but ultimately the existence of so many bad ideas provides an even stronger argument for the free flow of ideas. People need higher quality ideas with which to combat low quality ideas. The sad lack of decent ideas on TV, for instance, allows people like Rachel Maddow to have careers. Since bad ideas often have some sort of human desire behind them, many humans prioritize consuming bad ideas (slasher movies for instance) and give little to no priority to good ideas. If we push the cost of ideas to zero, we maximize the chance that the impoverished, inordinate human will find and entertain more good ideas.

While hunger is a much more immediate and acute problem, the noetic wasteland, which one must assume exists empirically because of such things as reality TV shows, is no less a poverty, and no less a danger to human life. Since copying an idea provides a benefit to another without causing an injury to holder of the original, charity should prevail for Christians. I would also hope that Christians would realize intellectual property is not property, but a state enforced travesty, since scarcity is one of the prerequisites for a thing to become property.