Revisiting Intellectual Property

Here is an email I shot over to Stephen Kinsella:

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Dear Mr. Kinsella,

I admit that I have yet to read your monograph on intellectual property (not out of disinterest, but because I am notoriously bad at actually reading what I intend to read), so I am not completely familiar with your stance on intellectual property (but, I know the general gist of it all).  Originally, this email was meant more as a question in "opposition" to your stance on IP, but I realized that it's not really developed or researched enough to be presentable.

Basically, I hold the position that intellectual property rights are not necessarily mutually exclusive to a free market, although I do agree that IP rights as they exist today are.  I've considered for some time -- admittedly, perhaps out of ignorance (this will be one of my questions, below) -- that intellectual property rights were just not allowed to develop on a free market, so we really have no example of what they would have looked like had they not been monopolized by government at a very early stage of their development.  I believe, however, that your case against IP (in the broadest sense) starts at the middle.  I don't think that that the fact that ideas are not scarce is a good starting place for whether or not IP rights should exist.

Let me expand upon this last point.  The reason property rights exist are not just because material property is scarce, although it is a major contributing factor.  Property rights developed out of the human interest to avoid conflict and instead opt for self-progress.  Of course, that material property is scarce is a major reason why this conflict arose, but I think the pivotal contribution is the idea of conflict.  I do admit that in many ways material property and IP are incomparable, but they are comparable in the fact that IP does create conflict.  This conflict is largely magnified by state monopolies, but the conflict nevertheless exists.  Furthermore, I think that in a free-market people would find ways of internalizing the benefits of their ideas.

How people internalize the benefits of their ideas may materialize completely different to how they did so with material property, but I think that this evolution would take place nonetheless.

I hope to further develop and elaborate these thoughts in an article very far down the road (after I read your monograph!).

Questions:

1)  Is there a good book on the history of IP?
2)  What is your opinion of what I wrote above?