This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 23rd, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Moral claims aside, it's difficult to come to a credible opinion on intellectual property from abstract

concepts without knowing something about circumstances.

So says Richard Epstein from the University of Chicago Law School, we spoke about copyright,

patents, and the problems surrounding them last month.

Just to clear away any deadwood that may exist, do you think that there are any legitimate

moral claims on behalf of intellectual property being a form of property?

Yeah, I mean these are very difficult because the first question you have to ask is there any moral claim for anything else being a form of property.

And one of the things I like to do to explain why intellectual property rights are respectable

is to show that the physical property rights for which they usually contrasted rights are Institute and you signed John Locke and the Labor Theory of Value.

Everybody says, I amend this is the way real property works.

And so now we have to ask whether intellectual property

with its rather more diffuse boundary rights

could be the same thing.

If you go to a Marxist institution and you ask about that,

what they will do is they'll start with Prudone.

And Prudone will say, in a state of nature,

everybody was entitled to go everywhere that he wanted to go and now that you

put fences up you've managed to eliminate these rights and so therefore all systems of

property are theft. Well then you think about this and you ask yourself what's the difference between the creation of property

rights by occupation recognized from time and memorial everywhere in the face of the world,

...