Who owns words? If words are mine, can they be yours, too? In a sense, language has to be “ours,” a shared resource that all can use.

What about ideas? Ideas are, after all, often expressed in words. But ideas are a particular sequence of words; an “idea” is a new sequence of words, an expression that conveys, actually moves, the thought of the creator to other people, in a way that can be understood by other people who did not conceive of the idea. Words can be acts of creation; as we are told in John 1:1 in the KJV, “In the beginning was the Word.”

Can words be property? Can property be stolen if you still have what you started with?

Property

Some argue that property is theft. Now, property is a combination of two rights: (a) the right to use a thing or an idea, and (b) the right to exclude others from such use. If you believe you have a right to use something, but I use force to exclude you from exercising that right, that actually does sound a lot like theft.

Suppose that there is a large piece of land, and we all graze our cattle on it. One day, as you bring your cattle out to eat grass, you see that all the pieces of land have been “enclosed,” or fenced off. There are armed guards standing along the fence lines. You have no place to graze your cattle, and they starve. Is that theft?

The usual story to justify such enclosure and exclusion has something to do with original acquisition. The first party to claim the right to use, and to exclude others, must have done so through legal and legitimate means. The Lockean account involves “combining labor” with the land, provided that there is “as much and as good” available to which others can combine their labor. Karl Marx (rightly, to my mind) mocks this idea; Robert Nozick made a valiant effort to revive and defend it.

My “two favorite Davids” — Hume and Schmidtz — propose a much more sensible justification for the right to exclude. The private right to exclude the “first appropriators” (see also Narveson) benefits society. Perhaps surprisingly, conferring a right to exclude benefits those who come later, even though there is no longer “as much and as good.” The Lockean proviso, in other words, is sufficient but is by no means necessary. Private property, far from being theft, solves the tragedy of the commons and is the answer to many externality problems, as has been pointed out by scholars ranging from Hardin to Coase to Demsetz.

That’s all for physical property, such as real estate, tools, cars: things. What about words, and ideas?