About 12 hours later ... let me edit down what I wrote at first and hit the tops of the arguments without mining the details.

I opened and closed with the fact that I also want to see intellectual property rights engaged correctly. I read the blog link posted above and followed links in that to other works. They do not support the argument but only raise more questions.

I said that I have Blackstone; I do not. I have Black's. I did find Blackstone online at the Avalon Project of Yale Law School. Just waving at those hefty volumes is insufficient as argument. From what I read there about property, anyone who sees an automobile can make one of his own.

Similarly, I went back to Locke's Second Treatise, online at http://www.Constitution.org and read the relevant sections, Chapter V (Property) sections 25 through 45. Even if I accept that Locke meant "something else" by "mixing one's labor" it is still plain to me from Locke that if you buy a computer and figure out how it works, you can build one of your own and even sell it to someone else. You have "mixed your labor" (invested creative effort, if you will) into the discovery of facts and the production of the object.

All of Locke's arguments about the value of an enclosed and cultivated acre versus a wild acre held in common apply to the process of reverse engineering.

Similarly, going through Blackstone on Incorporeal Inheritances, and the Rights of Things, I fail to find any argument that shows how making one of your own deprives the other creator of his property.

I agree that incorporeal things (abstractions) can be property. I will again point to the abstract money of account Pounds Shillings Pence that bankers created in the Middle Ages to deal with the plethora of coinages.

I will close again with my basic agreement with your INTENTION that objective law protects intellectual property. I just do not see that the arguments cited by D. B. Halling in "State of Innovation" establish it.