Kenneth Einar Himma (University of Washington - School of Law) has posted Information and the Limits of Unlimited Supply on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
It is sometimes thought that that legal protection of intellectual property is illegitimate because the supply of information objects is “unlimited.” On this view, there can be no rational point to recognizing and protecting property rights in an object that is available in unlimited supply; the costs of enforcement, one might argue, results in no significant benefit because it makes no sense to protect a person’s right to exclude others from consuming an object that is available in infinite supply. In this essay, I raise some questions about what can properly be inferred from the claim that the supply of information objects is “unlimited” in the relevant sense.
