ABSTRACT
The overwhelming majority of natural rights treatments of intellectual property in the last several decades have consistently called for increased limitations on the scope, strength and duration of intellectual property. Legal commentators, theorists and historians routinely characterize the ongoing legal controversy in intellectual property as being a contest between weak, utilitarian privileges, and strong, natural property rights. The provisions described are limitations on scope, they determine what actually is owned in contemporary intellectual property rights. The first is that, if we are talking about property rights over f in the familiar sense of the capacity to use f created by the duty of others to exclude themselves from f, then ideas are simply never owned. A prima facie more promising counter-argument might begin by asserting that an independent creator of an already-owned idea is to be vested with the same set of rights as the first creator.
