I’m writing “The Problem with Intellectual Property,” to appear in Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics, 2nd ed., Christoph Lütge & Marianne Thejls Ziegler, eds. (Springer, forthcoming 2025; Robert McGee, section ed.). (My “The Case Against Intellectual Property,” a different article, appeared in the first edition, Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics (Prof. Dr. Christoph Lütge, ed.; Springer, 2013) (chapter 68, in Part 18, “Property Rights: Material and Intellectual,” Robert McGee, section ed.).)
One of my footnotes is becoming unwieldy and I will have to pare it down, so I include the full version here, as I have trouble killing my darlings. [continue reading…]
On Twitter, someone asked pro-IP Objectivist law professor Adam Mossoff for recommendations for IP-skeptical writing from a pro-market and pro-industry perspective. (See also related tweets from Garett Jones and Jacob Huebert)
Shea Levy @shlevy
@AdamMossoff
do you have a recommended resource for the generally market/industry-friendly but IP-skeptical type?
I’m not sure if Mossoff understood the questions (but I doubt that), since he replied with a list of apparently pro-IP writings (I haven’t gone through them yet; will fisk this later): [continue reading…]
I was asked recently to guest lecture for a course taught to some mechanical engineering students at Colorado University Boulder (EMEN 4100: Engineering Economics) by the lecturer, David Assad. Assad covers some ethics related matters in the latter part of the course and asked me to talk generally about ethics and related matters. I discussed ethics, morality, politics, and science. I discussed ethics and its relationship to science and politics, and discussed about what science is, the types of sciences, ethics and ethical theories and the relationship to specialized ethics and morality in general, and its relationship to political ethics and political philosophy. I then discussed libertarianism in general, the nature and function of property rights, and then explained how the intellectual property issue can be addressed based on the libertarian and private law perspective. The references and notes I gave the class are embedded in the slides and reproduced below.
More copyright insanity. All a predictable result of unnatural, evil IP law. I can’t show this whole article, because of … evil copyright law. But a few choice nuggets
One influencer is suing another, accusing her of copying her minimalist aesthetic on social media. It turns out there is a lot of gray area in shades of beige.
The oversize beige cable-knit sweater. The center-parted hair. The right knee pointed out, creating a curve at her left hip.
Practically every detail in the photo — right down to the matching short set — looked familiar to Sydney Gifford. So did the woman posed in front of the nondescript white wall.
Days earlier, Ms. Gifford, a 24-year-old lifestyle influencer, had shared a photo with her thousands of followers that was virtually identical. The woman in this new photo was a fellow influencer, Alyssa Sheil, with whom she had gone shopping and done a photo shoot months earlier.
At the time, she thought their interactions had been merely awkward. But as she scrolled through Ms. Sheil’s photos on Instagram for the first time in nearly a year, she said, Ms. Gifford suspected those meetings had been some kind of aesthetic espionage.
… But in the carefully curated world of social media, Ms. Gifford has leveled a perhaps more severe charge against her: stealing her vibe.
There is no such thing as “intrinsic value” in economics. Value exists only in the eyes of the beholder. The concept of “value” is made possible by being valuable to a specific person, for a particular purpose. The only thing in the universe that is intrinsically valuable is human beings.
TLDR: Stop with nonsense like “Bitcoin has no intrinsic value”
Many of us who support free trade and private property rights tend to look favorably on regional and bilateral treaties that claim to further these goals. There is a vast network of bilateral investment treaties, or BITs, for example, designed to promote foreign direct investment by Western firms into developing nations by limiting the host state’s ability to expropriate the investments.
In addition to investment treaties that concern the property rights of foreign investors in host countries, there is also a global network of bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements ostensibly aimed at promoting trade between nations. Many of us favored so-called free trade agreements like NAFTA even if we would have preferred more radical approaches. Regional, multilateral, and bilateral trade agreements are viewed as incremental improvements even if thousands of pages of regulations could be easily replaced by a couple of sentences or, better, unilateral abolition of import tariffs.
But over time it has become apparent that “free trade” agreements often serve as a pretext for exporting Western intellectual property (IP) law—mainly US-style patent and copyright law—onto the rest of the world. This is what I call IP imperialism. Here’s how it works. First, we are told that intellectual property rights are legitimate, and in fact are part of the reason for the relative success of the industrialized countries in the West. (It’s not. For more on this, see You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property.)
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.
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