While the question of how to protect and encourage the products of the mind is not new, never has it been more in contention than in today's digital age. This work is a philosophical investigation of the concept of intellectual property. It discovers enough divergence within the literature to cast doubt upon the appropriateness of treating intellectual property as a species of traditional property. Most of the difficulties hinge on a fundamental existential difference between traditional property and intellectual property: where traditional property is a scarce resource, intellectual property cannot be described as such. Furthermore, empirical and mathematical studies have been unable to show that the protection of the products of the mind as property is universally effective in encouraging creativity and innovation. Given this, the work suggests two proposals for the way forward and offers several alternative metaphors to the property conceptualization of intellectual property.
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