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Around the world, the defenders of ''intellectual property'' are on the attack. Patent and copyright protection are a key item in the Uruguay round of trade talks under the GATT. The U.S. and the European Community have taken steps to tighten their own monopoly privileges for inventors, and insist their trading partners do likewise.

Here in Canada, the Tory government has made protection of intellectual property a cornerstone of its industrial policy, first with Bill C-22, amending the Patent Act, and lately with Bill C-60, altering sections of the Copyright Act affecting computer software, books, choreography, and other artistic works.

Here, once again, is the difference between a pro-market policy and one that is simply pro-business. Proper assessments of the costs of such policies are lacking, the more so since ''intellectual property rights'' have inevitably become associated with those shiny obsessions of pop economics - the information society, the knowledge economy and, of course, the high-tech revolution - in the service of which few receipts are ever required.

The term, ''intellectual property,'' is a fraud. If it were really property, we would not give inventors monopoly rights only for some arbitrarily limited time period. We'd make it permanent. If copying is theft after seven years, how is it any less so after 17? The vast preponderance of ''intellectual property,'' moreover, is unprotected by any form of patent or copyright. The manager who hits on a way to improve inventory control will no more stop to protect the idea by law than he would a clever remark or any of the millions of thoughts that crackle over the waves of our consciousness every day.

What's really involved in granting patents is nationalization with compensation. The classical case for patents holds that there is an optimal level of patent protection, trading off the costs to consumers of monopoly and its benefits, chief of which is to induce the patent applicant to reveal the fruits of his research to society.

This tradeoff is clearly difficult to assess. How much innovation would take place in return for how many extra years of patent life? How can we know? But beyond that, it's not obvious how close a connection really exists between innovation and patent protection.

The first point to consider, as ever, is enforceability. In Britain, the Law Lords were recently forced to admit the law was powerless to prevent home taping of music. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that confidential information is no more protected from theft than air. ''One cannot be deprived of confidentiality,'' the Court said, ''because one cannot own confidentiality. One enjoys it.''

There's no doubt that lots of piracy is going on. But there is considerable room for skepticism as to whether it really matters that much. It's possible to envisage a level of copying that might cut into innovation, but mostly it just cuts some of the fat off profits. In computer software, according to some estimates, at least one pirate copy is in use for every package sold through a dealer. Has anyone noticed a dearth of new programs on the market?

The recording industry claims the same ratio of loss to home taping, warning, ''if this continues, in five or 10 years, there won't be any music to tape.'' But has the number of new songs and new bands fallen off? Is home taping killing the music business? Don't make me laugh.

The lure of monopoly profits in fact often inspires companies to devote much time and expense to activity of dubious social value, designed to ''invent around'' the patent. Many of the ''inventions'' that emerge represent no technological advance. But they allow the ''inventor'' to carve out a chunk of the original market, at perhaps a slightly lower price.

PROTECTED POSITION

In any case, it is not so quick a matter as commonly supposed to bring out a copy. As the social theorist Sir William Petty wrote more than three centuries ago, ''the Inventor oftentimes drunk with the opinion of his own merit, thinks all the world will invade and incroach upon him, yet I have observed, that the generality of men will scarce be hired to make use of new practices, which themselves have not throughly tried . . . so as when a new Invention is first propounded, in the beginning every man objects, and the poor Inventor runs the Gantloop of all petulent wits.''

By the time the would-be copycat has selected the product from thousands of others, figured out how to make it, set up his manufacturing plant, and begun distribution, the original maker will as often as not already have firmly established itself in the market and have hedged about its position with brand- name advertising.

There are natural forces at work, in other words, to protect the interests of the inventor. Contracts should be enforced; fraud and misrepresentation cannot be countenanced; but beyond that, it is not clear how much extra protection is warranted.