C4SIF.org

For my friend George Reisman, I have hosted his Program of Self-Education in the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism lectures as well as his Pepperdine lectures on my site and youtube until he can get his old site Capitalism.net refurbished. He’s Objectivist so is in favor of IP (see Capitalism, excerpts below). Naturally, we disagree on this issue; see Trademark Ain’t So Hot Either…; Trademark and Fraud; Discussion with George Reisman; Trademark and Fraud; also The Problem with “Fraud”: Fraud, Threat, and Contract Breach as Types of Aggression). From Macro Lecture 14A Inflation I  [mp3]:

He states:

the consequence of that is that Capital will move from the low profit lines into the high profit lines that expands production in those lines in order to find buyers for the additional goods what has to happen to prices play come down when costs fall unless it’s a patented process or a secret technology in fairly short order prices are going to come down to correspondwith the lower costs and so if we had a wage rates broadly falling that would reduce costs and prices would decline commensurately when you have improvements in the productivity of Labor prices also decline and perhaps the most dramatic example in our own experience is the prices of a megabyte or a gigabyte of a hard drive space or of ram what’s happened to these things over the last 20 years prices diminish tremendously  …

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Related

• Libertarian and IP Answer Man: Artificial Intelligence and IP
• Whereupon Grok admits it (and AI) is severely gimped by copyright law
• Other AI posts

Mohamad Albakjaji and Reem Almarzouqi, “The Dilemma of the Copyrights of Artificial Intelligence,” International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development (IJSKD) 16, no.1 (2024): 1-15 (official)

Abstract:

Artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property (IP) share some key similarities, such as uncertainty in predictions, processing a massive amount of data, and machine learning. Yet, they also differ from each other. This paper provides background information on how these two domains have evolved over time. It also highlights how Saudi Arabia’s IP system differs from those of other countries. Furthermore, this article explores the relationship between AI and IP and their application in copyright. This study is significant as it helps identify the challenges and opportunities that AI presents with respect to IP in terms of copyright. Finally, this article makes recommendations that will help protect both AI and IP.

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Related:

• LP Platform
• Aggression and Property Rights Plank in the Libertarian Party Platform

All IP is unjust, including trademark law. This is implied by sec. 2.1 of the Platform, which leaves no room for IP rights “Aggression is the use, trespass against, or invasion of the borders of another person’s owned resource (property) without the owner’s consent; or the threat…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) October 2, 2025

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Related:

• Examples of Ways Content Creators Can Profit Without Intellectual Property
• IP as Contract
• The Problem with Intellectual Property
• IP Answer Man

In July 2010 I received the attached Word file via a service I used to use, YouSendIt. I just came across it in a search on my computer. I was unable to find the author at the time. I have confirmed it was Jim Cox, author of The Concise Guide To Economics. I never responded since I didn’t know who to respond to.

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See the site below based on Against Intellectual Property: Against Intellectual Property: A Stephan Kinsella Analysis: “Exploring how patent monopolies distort markets, stifle innovation, and violate genuine property rights through interactive economic modeling.”

Not sure how to describe it or what it is.

Related:

• The Problem with Intellectual Property
• The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright
• “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Patent”
• Against Intellectual Property
• Kinsella, You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023)
• Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023)
• “There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property”
• Richard Epstein’s Takings Political Theory versus Epstein’s Intellectual Property Views
• “Absurd Arguments for IP”
• USPTO/Commerce Dept. Distortions: “IP Contributes $5 Trillion and 40 Million Jobs to Economy”
• Patents: Horizontal vs Vertical Innovation
• Cato vs. Public Citizen on IP and the TPP
• KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory
• Succinct Criticism of Utilitarianism and Libertarian Creationism
• Libertarian Creationism
• Libertarian and Lockean Creationism: Creation As a Source of Wealth, not Property Rights; Hayek’s “Fund of Experience”; the Distinction Between Scarce Means and Knowledge as Guides to Action
• Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes
• Copyright is Unconstitutional

I have often pointed out that are are no good arguments for IP. They are all absurd.¹ This includes principled/deontological/natural rights/”creationist” arguments for IP² and empirical/consequentalist/utilitarian arguments. [continue reading…]

1. “There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property”; “Absurd Arguments for IP”; USPTO/Commerce Dept. Distortions: “IP Contributes $5 Trillion and 40 Million Jobs to Economy”. [↩]
2. KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory; Succinct Criticism of Utilitarianism and Libertarian Creationism; Libertarian Creationism; Libertarian and Lockean Creationism: Creation As a Source of Wealth, not Property Rights; Hayek’s “Fund of Experience”; the Distinction Between Scarce Means and Knowledge as Guides to Action. [↩]

Related:

• The Problem with Intellectual Property
• The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright
• Optimal Patent and Copyright Term Length
• Where did the patent term come from?
• Conversation with Sabhlok re Locke and Intellectual Property as a Natural Right or Property Right
• Sabhlok and Rogan on Intellectual Property
• KOL466 | On IP Reform and Improving IP law

From Sanjeev Sabhlok:

The final part of my piece on property rights and intellectual property has now been published by TOI:https://t.co/fNxvswYPKr

PDF containing all three parts: https://t.co/qAx2s4IwJI https://t.co/SxcBIiglCJ pic.twitter.com/iZcAKxGxhR

— Sanjeev Sabhlok (@sabhlok) September 29, 2025

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[Aug. 9, 2025]

Dear Mr. Kinsella,

I have been touching up on some of the anti-IP arguments that have been raised by libertarian theorists and you alike.

Specifically, I think the argument goes like this. [continue reading…]

Adapted from a Twitter post:

The banality of evil on full display: IP shill and buffoon Gene Quinn (https://t.co/pkD0AX0r0f) and clueless technocrat Darren Tang of WIPO (https://t.co/dW9FMao9M7) mirthfully yapping along and praising “IP as a Force for Good”. Πάτερ, ἄφες αὐτοῖς, οὐ γὰρ οἴδασιν τί…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) September 15, 2025

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@witheredsummer has fed a bunch of my and others’ anti-IP writing into Google’s Notebook LM to create an AI to answer IP questions: the Anti-IP Bible. Here’s one example:

IP is bad, actually, and @NSKinsella is right in every single thing he has ever written about IP, and if you disagree you’re a socialist. pic.twitter.com/bxksLqyEFc

— Kadaververwertungsanstalt (@witheredsummer) September 12, 2025

The IP clause in the US Constitution authorizes Congress to enact patent law by authorizing it “to promote the Progress of . . . useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to . . . Inventors the exclusive Right to their . . . Discoveries.” The Patent Act does this by the so-called “patent bargain“:

The disclosure requirement lies at the heart and origin of patent law. An inventor, or the inventor’s assignee, is granted a monopoly for a given period of time in exchange for the inventor disclosing to the public how to make or practice their invention. If a patent fails to contain such information, then the bargain is violated, and the patent is unenforceable or can be revoked.

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I’ve discussed before the error of libertarian or Lockean “creationism” that underlies one of the main arguments for intellectual property. See: [continue reading…]

Below is an except from Stop Regulating Games, A Withered Remnant, by @witheredsummer:

The Real Problem: Intellectual Property

Multiple times I hinted at this before, but finally, we got here. Intellectual property is, simply put, the root of all these problems. I am not here to explain the philosophical problems of intellectual property, for that you should read Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property, and, if you’d like to learn more about the real-world impact of intellectual property, you could read my essay, Ideas Are Free: A Case Against Intellectual Property. [continue reading…]