I re-post it here since it’s not unsound, and as I apparently qualify for the very restrictive fascist copyright license the Mises Institute is trying to slap on this piece—CC-BY-NC-ND (no doubt without the author’s knowledge or consent, making this license’s effectiveness questionable)1 —since my site is (I guess?) “non-commercial,” whatever that means. I guess they don’t want a “commercial” site (whatever that is; why an ostensibly pro-capitalist, pro-free market organization hates the profit motive is unclear) republishing their pro-freedom message—wouldn’t want to spread the ideas of liberty without some control and oversight! And I guess they don’t want any translations made—that is prohibited by the “ND”, or no derivative works, part.
The early Austrians such as F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises were skeptical of intellectual property. Although there has been a plethora of classical liberals who have portrayed intellectual property as a guarantee for social mobility to occur, government manipulation of market opportunity has created a problematic power concentration that has been granted and executed by the politicians in Brussels. [continue reading…]
I have occasionally corresponded with Deirdre McCloskey, and met the good doctor in person at FreedomFest in Rapid City, South Dakota (with my buddy Juan Carpio) in July 2021.
A venture-backed referral platform registered ATTICUS for “legal services,” sent a cease-and-desist to California PI lawyer Atticus Wegman demanding he stop using his own given name, and is now being sued in C.D. Cal. for cancellation of the mark on nonuse, abandonment, and lack of quality control. That is trademark functioning as a state monopoly over a word, used to impose costs on a competitor (and on a man using his own name)—the pattern Kinsella has filed for years under “trademark horror stories,” not a genuine fraud claim belonging to confused clients. [continue reading…]
Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics, Christoph Luetge and Marianne Thejls Ziegler, eds. (Springer, Dordrecht 2026) has been published, including my chapter “The Problem with Intellectual Property.” Published as of Aug. 29, 2026; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6176-6_99-1. This chapter is based on Stephan Kinsella, “The Problem with Intellectual Property,” Papinian Press Occasional Paper, No. 2 (May 15, 2025) [v.1.1]. See further background details there.
In my journey from political blank slate, to rejecting both Democrats and Republicans, to embracing Randian minarchist libertarianism, and then (six months later, as the joke goes) full anarchism, my biggest stumbling block wasn’t the roads (ha ha) or even the police, courts, or military.
Nope, it was so-called “intellectual property (IP).”
Indoctrinated as I was, I couldn’t see how creativity and productivity could exist without patent and copyright protections. Worse, I thought IP was good and true, just and moral, as Rand (and my college professors) insisted. [continue reading…]
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged there is a famous scene when a series of irrational mistakes lead to the Taggart Comet disaster. It is caused when railroad officials, under political pressure from a powerful passenger and unwilling to take responsibility, ordered the Comet into an eight-mile mountain tunnel with an unsafe coal-burning locomotive instead of a diesel. The train stalled from the fumes, passengers and crew asphyxiated, and an oncoming Army munitions train crashed into it, triggering an explosion that permanently sealed the tunnel. The catastrophe resulted from the broader collapse of competence and judgment under collectivist policies that had driven capable people out of the system.
Rand’s description in effect blames the victim-passengers for sharing the irrational views that led to it. She starts out:
It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
As noted here, “Ayn Rand’s newsletters used to end with a “Horror File” of monstrous but true quotations.”
Along those lines, it’s time to collect some choice trademark horror stories in one place. The main post will be here, on the Mises Blog, but I’ll cross-post the initial post here too. But look there for updates (or to add suggestions in the comments). (Update: I might as well also list here similar examples from patent, copyright, and even trade secret. See below.)
Apple’s products seem light years ahead of the competition. By the time the competition starts getting vaguely close to making a product that approximates its excellence and elegance, Apple announces the new thing that is more astonishing than ever, and the whole thing starts again.
This came home to me this last week when I once again tried the Sony Reader, only to realize (once again) that it is nowhere close to being as good a reader as the iPhone itself, which is a product miles and miles ahead of the hundreds of phones you see lined up at Wal-Mart or Verizon. The same is true in laptops. [continue reading…]
Frédéric Bastiat is considered by many to be one of the greatest economic journalists of all time.[1] However, it has been argued that he also made far more important contributions to the science of economics than most economists realize. Various current issues could benefit greatly from many of the ideas put forth in his writings. One such issue is that of intellectual property. His belief in the importance of competition leads one to conclude that a naturally harmonious economy is only possible when the economic laws are undisturbed.[2] Though Bastiat wrote very little about patents, his position against them can be strengthened by much of his writings. [continue reading…]
My friend Carl Horowitz writes a good piece urging Hollywood to join the film pirates rather than fight them [Link broken. Closest I could find is Carl Horowitz, “Hollywood: Land of Libertarianism,” TownHall (Dec 05, 2009). —SK]. He is surely right about this. Film downloads cannot be stopped, but the premise of his article is that if they could be stopped, they should be stopped.
He makes an analogy to baseball. He says that defending piracy as a right is like saying that “so long as there are empty seats at a major league baseball game, there’s nothing wrong with crashing the gates. After all, my freebie neither affects the game’s outcome nor diminishes anyone’s revenues or salaries. Plus, by telling my friends about the game, I am widening the audience for baseball.” [continue reading…]
Since the early 1990s, Western economies have undergone a complete and perilous transformation. They have shifted from systems centered on the production of tangible goods to ones dominated by the extraction of rents through finance and intellectual property. Factories and machine tools gave way to platforms and algorithms, both resting on legal monopolies. Wealth came to be measured less by what nations manufactured than by the soaring market capitalizations of technology companies whose primary assets consisted of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and proprietary data. This was presented as the inevitable triumph of the “knowledge economy.” In reality, it represented a dangerous wager: that legal privileges and financial engineering could indefinitely substitute for genuine productive capacity. [continue reading…]
I have pointed out before that patent and copyright law have only gotten worse over time, almost never better, except by some occasional judicial interpretations of the patent and copyright statutes,1 which is inevitable since these so-called “IP” laws grant artificial, unjust, and nonobjective IP rights.2 The copyright term has increased from 14/28 years to well over 100; criminal penalties have been added; and its scope has increased to cover software, video, and so on even though the Constitution only speaks of “writings.”
The only exceptions that come to mind is that for copyright, the DMCA, and for defamation, the CDA, gave platforms/ISPs some protection from liability for infringing/defamatory acts of users (see Grok summary).
And for patent, AIA’s expansion of the prior commercial user defense in 2011, and 1997 limits on enforcement of patents on surgery procedures.3
A recent IPWatchdog podcast, Patent Damages on Trial: Rule 702 and the Daubert Conundrum (July 18, 2026) (transcript below) discusses recent changes to how damages can be proved in patent infringement litigation. It’s hosted by patent shill and buffoon Gene Quinn4 and includes a bunch of legal positivist, mainstream patent lawyers etc.
They are whining in part about how difficult the federal courts are making it to “scientifically” prove damages. For example, suppose you make a phone that has some chip that uses a technique that slightly speeds up computation time or slightly increases battery efficiency, and this allegedly infringes a patent on this technique or circuit. Suppose the phone sells for $700. How much of that $700 is “attributable” to the tiny component? Nobody knows, or can know; the question is ill defined and unanswerable. But you have to give an answer, since you have to “apportion” damages somehow. The panelists below discuss the “the 25% rule”—the previous rules that posited that a reasonable royalty is roughly 25% of the infringer’s expected profits—originated in a non-representative sample of mid-20th-century Swiss chemical licenses and had no scientific foundation, which was rejected by the Federal Circuit in Uniloc USA, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 632 F.3d 1292 (Fed. Cir. 2011), as failing the reliability requirements of Daubert and Rule 702 (Grok elaboration). [continue reading…]
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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