IP stands for “intellectual property.” It refers to ideas and inventions as well as the process of copyrighting or patenting them. But it’s a loaded term that disguises an enormous philosophical debate and even bigger power-grab.

Let’s say you’ve just invented an engine that runs on saltwater, not gasoline. Or your lazy, no-account son-in-law who calls strumming a guitar “work” composes a song. I wrote this article.

These creations are essentially ideas; are they “property” as well? If so, do each of us own what we’ve produced? To what extent? Can you prevent another inventor’s adapting your engine to fresh water? Can Mr. Composer stop Team Obama from using his music in a re-election campaign? If you copy this article and sell my priceless prose, do I receive a cut of the proceeds?

Some folks answer “no” to the above. They reason that a finite number of people can use tangible property at one time while ideas suffer no such limits. Only you can wear your shirt at this moment; only you and a few friends can sit together on your sofa. But theoretically, at least, everyone worldwide can simultaneously think about Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”

Others say ideas are indeed property. People who work with them should reap the fruits of their labor. Just as customers pay a manufacturer for his widgets, so they should pay Kipling for his poem. Consumers of ideas should compensate the writers, composers, and inventors who deal in them.

Wherever you land in this debate, we who distrust Leviathan can all agree that private systems would best protect IP. After all, that’s how we secure physical property like our homes or cars (locks and keys; smoke detectors; burglar alarms) and virtual property (passwords on email accounts).

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution does authorize Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Earlier Americans spoke of this “exclusive Right” as a “monopoly,” prompting the question of whether anyone, even its creator, can monopolize an idea. No wonder people with financial interests in patenting replaced “monopoly” with the friendlier “intellectual property” in the late twentieth century.

But the Founding Fathers, for all their brilliance, were fallible; we need not leave Article 1, Section 8 to find more mistakes, such as empowering the Feds to “coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof” as well as “to establish” – and thereby control – a Post Office. Allowing government to meddle with IP is as disastrous as allowing it to regulate money.

Managing IP increases the State's power. For example, America’s new national government granted monopolies on “useful” inventions – as politicians defined that: applicants actually appeared before the Secretaries of State and War as well as the Attorney General to persuade them of said “usefulness.” Today, inventors often work for corporations that own hundreds of patents and field lobbyists to mold legislation in their favor; ditto for associations of writers and composers. That means the State not only doles out patents and copyrights, it also polices consumers, such as those who download “illegally distributed” files from the internet.

Introducing laws and compulsion inevitably pits citizens against one another as legislators crown some folks victors and everyone else losers. In IP’s case, the winner varies according to time and country. Some governments want IP’s chief beneficiary to be “society” rather than the inventor, especially when their nations are poor and developing. They generally offer only crude legal monopolies on ideas; they may even actively encourage native sons to swipe inventions and discoveries from other nations. Indeed, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans copied – and often improved on – gadgets like the steam engine from such places as England.

As peoples grow wealthier, however, full-fledged inventors replace the thieves, and they now clamor for IP to protect their profits. That’s particularly true in sophisticated countries like the US.

Obviously, such protection extends only as far as a particular government’s muscle does. But the rise of superpowers in the twentieth century and the explosive growth of IP law have foisted a new danger on us: international agreements that force the desires of IP lobbies in richer nations on everyone else. That includes not only larcenous “inventors” in poor countries but even consumers back home.

Which brings us to the infamous Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement (ACTA), a series of negotiations conducted intermittently since 2007. Among the participants are the US as well as the 27 members of the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia, and even Switzerland and New Zealand. Their politicians are writing regulations to control all of us; later signatories will have no input on the provisions, even if the poor people who want progress in their countries outnumber the inventors who want protection. Such are the perils of one-world government.

American consumers are just as imperiled. The music and movie industries, among others, fret at our “pirated” downloads, and they press Leviathan for draconian new measures to stop us. No one knows for sure what those measures are: in addition to its other evils, ACTA veils itself in deepest secrecy. Indeed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) petitioned the Feds to disclose their actions on ACTA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Bush Administration denied EFF’s request with its all-purpose refrain: national security. No surprise there – but Obama’s regime with all its hype about “Transparency and Open Government” cited the same bizarre pretext when refusing KEI’s demand.

That has commentators who follow IP in a justifiable tizzy. Richard Stallman, “a software developer and software freedom activist,”  says of ACTA, “We wouldn’t like it if we knew. …[T]hey could do to us whatever they want. I can only guess that it’s going to be nasty, because if it weren’t going to be nasty, they wouldn’t need to keep it a secret.”  

Leaked papers from ACTA’s negotiations are indeed nasty. They propose to criminalize “peer-to-peer file-sharing,” or, as the Recording Industry Association of America puts it, “Policy makers and law enforcement authorities must…recognize that Internet-based infringement, even when done without a profit motive, takes place on a commercial scale and has the same impact on copyright owners as for-profit piracy. It is essential…to criminalize such conduct, even though the individual actor may not be acting with any profit incentive, or possess what one would ordinarily think of as 'criminal intent.'" In other words, if you patronize Youtube, MySpace, or Facebook, which feature “unauthorized use of content on the[ir] platforms,” or if your briefcase holds Xeroxes of copyrighted articles, you’re a criminal.

How would “authorities” enforce the law? ACTA proposes to draft your Internet Service Provider (ISP) as cop: ISPs will spy on your surfing and downloads, just as laws against drunk driving force bartenders to monitor patrons. And just as bartenders must cut off tipsy customers, so ISPs will cut off customers after their third “offense.”

Horrific and intrusive as a private company’s surveillance may be, it gets worse. ACTA also urges customs officers worldwide to follow the US’s example and search computers, iPods, cell phones, etc. Other governments may not give lip-service to freedom, but they also neglect to rifle guests’ electronics as they enter the country. The Feds seek to change that through ACTA, compelling those countries to match American tyranny and thereby please the IP lobby.

Rather than liberty, we now export chains.

Becky Akers, an expert on the American Revolution, writes frequently about issues related to security and privacy. Her articles and columns have been published by Lewrockwell.com, The Freeman, Military History Magazine, American History Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post, and other publications.

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