What is it that we own when we claim an idea as ours? Surely, not the atoms in the air that carry the sound of our voice, nor the pixels on a screen that carry our words. What we own is not the matter, the energy, or the space in which an idea takes shape. We own something more elusive: the improbable act that arranged these things into a meaningful configuration. We own a transformation.
In The Origin of Moral Claims, we rooted the human concept of justice in our ability to distinguish between natural causes and human agency. When a stone falls from a cliff, we may mourn its impact. But when a hand pushes another off that cliff, we demand accountability. Justice, then, emerges from agency and from the ability to trace consequences back to a willful act.
The same principle underlies the concept of property. Labor, as a transformation of nature, creates something that did not exist before: a configuration unlikely to occur without human intent. This improbability, the deviation from the natural drift toward disorder, is what we recognize and reward. To labor is to inject order into a chaotic world, and the resulting order, the transformation, is what we rightly attribute to the agent. However, it is an understatement to say that nowhere is this more contested than in the realm of intellectual property.
An idea begins as a silent configuration in a single mind, existing as a low-entropy structure formed by improbable neural firings, experiences, associations, and abstractions. To express it is to take this improbable state and encode it, through language or gesture or machine, into forms that others can receive. Each act of communication reproduces the pattern, transmitting it from one brain to another. But in doing so, it also initiates the entropy clock.
As ideas spread, they change. They become simplified, distorted, reinterpreted, reframed. They are copied imperfectly, reused creatively, and recombined with others. This is not a flaw of communication, but its essence. In thermodynamic terms, the unique, ordered configuration diffuses. The idea moves toward equilibrium with its environment. What was once a distinct act of agency becomes part of a wider informational field.
To protect intellectual property is to resist this diffusion; this is an assertion, for a time, of the uniqueness and authorship of the configuration. This time-limited exclusivity is not merely a legal convenience, but a moral echo of the act of creation. It acknowledges that the improbable arrangement of thoughts deserves recognition and reward, but only so long as it remains improbably arranged. Entropy gives us the limit.
There is a point at which an idea has spread so widely, and been so altered by the medium of its transmission, that the original act can no longer be distinguished. It becomes part of the background informational noise. Consider, for an extreme example, the inventor of the wheel. To continue to claim exclusive rights beyond this point is to claim ownership of something no longer uniquely traceable. The agent has faded; the transformation has dissolved.
Scientific studies support this thermodynamic model of informational diffusion. Theories of social contagion and rumor dynamics show how ideas lose coherence and traceability as they spread. Entropy-based measures in information theory demonstrate how structure degrades over time and with replication. Legal scholars have even begun to describe "legal entropy" in relation to shifting precedents and uncertainties in intellectual property law.
We can imagine a mathematical expression of this decay. Let the distinctiveness of an idea's configuration be a function that decays with time and dissemination. As it spreads, the probability of its re-creation without reference to the original increases. When this probability crosses a certain threshold, the justification for exclusivity vanishes.
This is not mere speculation, but a potential foundation for reform. Just as physical property rights are constrained by use and waste, intellectual property rights must be constrained by relevance and reach. A theory of property grounded in justice must recognize not just the birth of an act, but the moment it ceases to be distinguishable as one.
To own an idea, then, is to own an act that begins within one’s mind, a configuration wrought by improbable labor. But like all acts, it fades with time. Justice demands that we let go when the trace is lost, when the pattern becomes part of the common field, when entropy has done its work. In that release, we affirm not just fairness, but the very principle that made ownership possible in the first place: the recognition of agency.