KOL229 | Ernie Hancock Show: IP Debate with Alan Korwin: “Korwin’s Defense and Departure (49:59–1:17:42) … Korwin doubles down, arguing that copyright is a natural right, more real than physical property because it’s a unique creation.”
A recent post by Nick Weininger on The Agitator blog (run by Cato’s Radley Balko) offers some good points in rebuttal to Eugene Volokh’s argument which attempts to defend IP rights by analogy with tangible property rights.A quick perusal of Volokh’s post shows that he focuses on assigning property rights so as to give the proper incentives to invest or use resources efficiently. I think Volokh’s whole approach to property rights is confused, however. It is basically a utilitarian approach, which is of course, problematic, as Austro-libertarians well know. As I’ve argued elsewhere (and here), property rights allocate who has the right to control a resource. Obviously the very purpose of this is to specify which person, of multiple possible users, gets to use the thing. If there is no possibility of conflict over the thing, property rights are simply pointless. [continue reading…]
One thing that is striking about advocating intellectual property rights–rights in non-scarce things–is that one is inevitably bound up in a self-contradictory position. For although they want to say that non-scarce things (like ideas, inventions, etc.) are “just as much property” as are scarce things like physical resources, they always, when it comes down to it, want to enforce IP rights against scarce resources.In other words, to make IP rights “real”–you have to step down from the abstract realm and enter the real world. If you infringe someone’s patent–they get to take some of your money. Or they can get a court order to stop you from using your own tangible property in a certain way. But remedies against IP rights are never remedies only in the intangible realm. They are always made real, made concrete, by putting them in terms of real things. [continue reading…]
The UK’s House of Lords [sic] Communications and Digital Committee has released a little report, titled “AI, copyright and the creative industries” (HL Paper 267, 4th Report of Session 2024–26) (March 6, 2026). See this tweet and the press release below. No time to read yet, but a quick and dirty Grok analysis is provided below (I better use AI before these maniacs kill it).
I delivered the following lecture yesterday: “The Economics and Ethics of Intellectual Property,” Loyola Economics Club and Louisiana Mu chapter of Omicron Delta Epsilon, Loyola University—New Orleans, Miller Hall (12:30 pm–1:45 pm, Feb. 24, 2026). Hosts were the aforementioned Econ club and econ honor society, as well as Walter Block and Leo Krasnozhon. 1 Audio for the Q&A portion was poor due to some technical mishaps, but has been boosted as much as possible.
The topic of intellectual property (IP) is a difficult one, a point that requires serious thought to understand in its fullness. It’s become the subject of debate with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). The products of LLM (large language model) are not subject to copyright control and this is by design: open sourcing is a precondition for wide distribution and acceptance. Indeed, most of the top entrepreneurs working on AI have spoken out against intellectual property and even called for its abolition.
Of course IP is a threat to AI;2 it’s a threat to human life in general.3[continue reading…]
The Patent Holocaust; Because of her error, Ayn Rand chose IP over real property rights, she chose death over life; The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism (“It is obscene to undermine the glorious operation of the market in producing wealth and abundance by imposing artificial scarcity on human knowledge and learning (see “IP and Artificial Scarcity“). Learning, emulation, and information are good. It is good that information can be reproduced, retained, spread, and taught and learned and communicated so easily. Granted, we cannot say that it is bad that the world of physical resources is one of scarcity — this is the way reality is, after all — but it is certainly a challenge, and it makes life a struggle. It is suicidal and foolish to try to hamper one of our most important tools — learning, emulation, knowledge — by imposing scarcity on it. Intellectual property is theft. Intellectual property is statism. Intellectual property is death. Give us intellectual freedom instead!” Patents are death. Patents are slavery. See Roderick Long: Owning Ideas Means Owning People; The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights). [↩]
I’ve pointed out before how many allegedly free market groups are pro-patent (and pro-IP in general), e.g. the Federalist Society, Cato, Independent Institute, and others.1 As I wrote previously,
I’ve learned from reliable sources connected with various free market think tanks around the world that various important companies, in particular pharmaceutical, have become “supporters” of such think tanks–provided, of course, that the think tank supports intellectual property rights. Could this be one reason many free market think tanks are supportive of IP despite a mounting case against it?
I wonder if this is one reason for some of Cato’s pro-patent positions.2
A friend suggested Reason is also influenced by pharmaceutical donors, send me a Grok report that says [continue reading…]
Nozick was bad on IP: he was confused and weakly in favor of some form of patent law; very diletanttish reasoning, as often is the case for Nozick. See William Fisher, “Theories of Intellectual Property” (2), in Stephen Munzer, ed., New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property (Cambridge University Press, 2001), text at n.5. Also Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 182: “independent inventors, upon whom the burden of proving independent discovery may rest, should not be excluded from utilizing their own invention as they wish (including selling it to others).” On Nozick’s dilettantism and “razzle-dazzle,” see Kinsella, Afterword to Hoppe’s The Great Fiction, Second Expanded Edition, and Hoppe, Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty. [continue reading…]
Abstract: We propose a permissionless patronage protocol. A publisher shares a work and a public address. A subscriber contributes to the publisher through a distributor. The contribution is recorded and can be verified in a trust-minimized way. The cost for both the subscriber and the publisher to switch between distributors is zero.
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