Intellectual property is not literal property, it is a metaphor. When we say that you have intellectual property, what we mean is that the government will use its monopoly on force to prevent other people from doing something similar to what you do. To say that Pfizer has a patent is the same as saying that the government will stop other people from manufacturing the Pfizer vaccine. So removing the vaccine patents is the government saying that it will not prevent people from manufacturing vaccines. Which, I believe, is something you have been (rightly) advocating in other contexts for months.
It’s true that all notions of property involve some kind of social norm to enforce, usually a social norm in the form of a law backed by government force. What’s different is that in the case of literal property, the scarcity is already out there in the world before the government shows up. It is a fact of the world, independent of social norms, that there is only one of each physical thing. If more than one person wants to decide what to do with a given physical thing, then there is an inherent conflict there. All the government is doing is stepping in to resolve that conflict.
Intellectual property is different, which is why I say it is only a metaphor. With intellectual property, the scarcity is not out there in the world, it is created by the government. My copying your computer code to my hard drive and running it on my processor doesn’t deprive you of your hard drive, your processor, or even your code. You can still run your copy of your code, you haven’t lost anything. The scarcity isn’t a fact of the world, there is no conflict until the government comes in and tells me to stop. And creating artificial scarcity is just an objectively bad thing to do. Especially when the thing you are artificially making scarce is a life-saving vaccine.
Intellectual property is not literal property, it is a metaphor. When we say that you have intellectual property, what we mean is that the government will use its monopoly on force to prevent other people from doing something similar to what you do. To say that Pfizer has a patent is the same as saying that the government will stop other people from manufacturing the Pfizer vaccine. So removing the vaccine patents is the government saying that it will not prevent people from manufacturing vaccines. Which, I believe, is something you have been (rightly) advocating in other contexts for months.
Right, and in this case the US government is not removing/revoking patents.
Isn’t that true of all property though?
Ownership is not an innate property of physical objects. It’s just saying that the government will use force etc.
It’s true that all notions of property involve some kind of social norm to enforce, usually a social norm in the form of a law backed by government force. What’s different is that in the case of literal property, the scarcity is already out there in the world before the government shows up. It is a fact of the world, independent of social norms, that there is only one of each physical thing. If more than one person wants to decide what to do with a given physical thing, then there is an inherent conflict there. All the government is doing is stepping in to resolve that conflict.
Intellectual property is different, which is why I say it is only a metaphor. With intellectual property, the scarcity is not out there in the world, it is created by the government. My copying your computer code to my hard drive and running it on my processor doesn’t deprive you of your hard drive, your processor, or even your code. You can still run your copy of your code, you haven’t lost anything. The scarcity isn’t a fact of the world, there is no conflict until the government comes in and tells me to stop. And creating artificial scarcity is just an objectively bad thing to do. Especially when the thing you are artificially making scarce is a life-saving vaccine.