Someone forwarded to me the email below from one Martin Gundinger of the Austrian Economics Center to one Britt Schier of the Friedrich A. v. Hayek Institute urging support of World IP Day. Both organizations are headquartered in Vienna; Barbara Kolm is Founding Director of the former and President of the latter, and is heralded as being “renowned for promoting free market policies.” (She is also co-founder of the Javier Milei Institut für Deregulierung in Europa (Javier Milei Institute for Deregulation in Europe), and also Vice-President of the Central Bank of Austria (Oesterreichische Nationalbank) from 2018 to 2023.
Institutes that are supposed to promote free market policies should not be promoting IP socialism! I guess we should not be surprised—Hayek was wobbly on IP1 and on libertarian and free market property rights principles in general.2[continue reading…]
@NSKinsella Thoughts about this way to bypass open source licensing or other licensing? Using old “clean room” tachnique with AI. 🤖 https://t.co/kX7yFTr6Af
My response to this post: if Gemini’s AI summary of the video is right this guy is a retard–whining that we can use AI to get around open source licensing? The whole point of open-source licensing was as a response to normal restrictive use of copyright. If there was no copyright, you would need no license at all, the concept of open source would not exist, and there would also be no need for AIs to reengineer already existing code. There would no impediment to using existing code to develop new code.
The clean room approach has been around a long time as a way to prove no access and thus no copying and thus no copyright infringement liability. It’s another inefficient maneuver people have to resort to as a response to the evil and distorting existence of copyright. I’m sure the IP assholes will complain if humans use AI as one temporary reprieve from IP socialism. [continue reading…]
Claiming ownership over one’s “voice” is incoherent—akin to claiming ownership over a specific guitar tone—and would inevitably imply the ability to claim ownership over a whistle, a nasal sound, or any other noise a human being is capable of producing. This *reductio ad absurdum* demonstrates that, in legal terms, it is logically impossible to establish a non-arbitrary boundary distinguishing what constitutes an infringement of a right to one’s “voice” from what does not. For instance, let us imagine that Donald Trump possesses a legal right to his own voice; does this mean I am breaking the law if I convincingly imitate his voice? Does it mean that if I were to be born with a voice identical to his, I would be, by biological nature, a criminal? [continue reading…]
A talk by Law Professor David Simon (SSRN). From his Abstract. More analysis below.
Abstract: Copyright law grants authors special non-economic “moral rights” to prevent others from using their works in certain ways. In their strongest “solipsistic” form, moral rights give the author the absolute power to prevent any use that offends her sensibilities. While the solipsistic view of moral rights exists in only a few countries, the sentiment underlying it is pervasive in moral rights theory: an author’s claims are superior to all others because only the author knows when harm occurs, regardless of others’ views. In other words, certain uses of works result in the author experiencing harm that no one else can experience and that does not depend on what others think. This Article asks and evaluates the following question: can harm based only on the author’s subjective experience justify solipsistic moral rights?
It argues that the answer is probably not—and that, if supported, solipsistic moral rights will be tightly limited. Drawing on literature in science fiction and philosophy, this Article. contends that the best justification for the monastic view is also the most implausible: authors have moral rights only when another’s use causes the author to experience an inconsistency between her perceived use of the work and her memories of creating the work. In short, an author’s rights are contingent on her ability to remember creating her work. This is the best justification because the author’s memories of creating the work satisfy all the requirements for authorial harm: it identifies discrete psychological states that are tied directly and only to the author’s acts of creation, independent of others’ perceptions. It is the least plausible, however, because it conditions important rights on one’s ability to remember past actions. Despite its seeming implausibility, the author’s memories of creation provide the best support for grounding monastic moral rights. As a consequence, the case for monastic moral rights, if it can be made, is tightly limited to cases where another’s use of an author’s work causes a negative psychological response directly tied to the author’s memories of creating the work.
Moral rights—non-economic rights that enable authors to control how their copyrighted work is divulged, attributed, modified, and withdrawn—are grounded on the Investment Theory: when an author creates a work, she invests part of her self in it. Because the work is an extension of the author’s “self,” special rights—not merely economic rights—are needed to protect it. Although intuitive, the rationale raises two central questions any moral rights theorist must address: how can an author invest her “self” in a work, and how might the law protect this investment? Moral rights scholars have not provided a satisfactory answer to the first question, making the second one difficult to address. This Article argues that an idea from social psychology might help answer the first question and shape how we respond to the second. Rather than some philosophical or abstract conception of the self, the authorial self the law protects is the social one: the self created and maintained through social interaction.
On this account, moral rights are tools to present and manage aspects of this social self. They are limited “rights of impression management.” This framing enables two analytical moves. First, it precisifies what moral rights protect (the social self as externalized in the work) and the harm they protect against (potential inconsistencies in that self). Second, it provides a framework for discussing how moral rights ought to protect the self from harm, raising the ultimate questions of whether and to what extent the Investment Theory is justified.
See also Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Sept. 9, 1886, as revised at Paris on July 24, 1971 and amended on Sept. 28, 1979, art. 6bis, 1161 U.N.T.S. 3 (commonly cited as the Paris Act 1971) (note: The TRIPS Agreement incorporates most substantive Berne provisions but explicitly excludes Article 6bis moral rights obligations for WTO members who are not Berne parties), art. 6bis:
Article 6bis
Moral Rights: 1. To claim authorship; to object to certain modifications and other derogatory actions;
2. After the author’s death; 3. Means of redress
(1) Independently of the author’s economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation.
This entire presentation and argument shows the utter incoherence of modern legal “intellectual property” theory. I have long condemned the most harmful forms of IP, patent and copyright, as well as the more well known forms, trademark and trade secret, as well as the reputation rights of defamation law. And there are others, including an aspect of copyright called moral rights: inalienable rights to attribution and to the “integrity” of the work, whatever that means. Just listen to the confused pseudophilosophical musings of this guy. It’s almost unbearable to hear him jabber on in this legal positivist way, anchored to nothing, going from metaphor to amateur Total Recall thought experiments. Rambling on about how one’s “memories” of having “created” something is what “matters” to him, and how violating that “thing”s integrity “harms” him, blah blah blah.
The main theories of IP are Lockean—based on Lockean creationism—and utilitarian; a third, more obscure, even more inscrutable one is the Hegelian “personality” argument which this guy, wittingly or not, is partly relying on. [continue reading…]
I’ve heard he has read my IP writing. He seems to be skeptical; see this tweet and Yumber Vera Rojas, “A decree by Javier Milei attacks copyright,” Página|12 (June 29, 2025) (“The regulations mean that hotels and party halls do not pay Sadaic … Musicians, managers, and directors of Sadaic oppose the measure, which could be brought to court in the coming days.”); “Milei government deregulates collection of author’s royalties“: “President Javier Milei government orders deregulation of the collection of authorship royalties in Argentina, whose processing was previously obliged to pass through a society for artists but can now be transmitted without intermediation.”
When he writes “Expecting to be protected by the law many people say, ‘If it wasn’t true, then surely someone would have sued,'” he is recognizing that defamation law, perversely and ironically, has the effect of amplifying the power of defamation and lies, as I noted in my post Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property—as does Alan Burris, whom he cites, but unlike me and Schoolland, Burris mangles the IP issue, while getting the defamation issue wrong.
Sticks and Stones: A Critique of Libel and Llander Laws
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” So goes the saying of children who are so much wiser than their elders. But as young people grow up they learn that there are laws at their command that can be used to bring “sticks and stones” down upon people who say bad things about them. [continue reading…]
Today we published a paper in Nature Biotechnology which describes a PCR technique which navigates 1000s of gene patents. 10-20% of human genes are patented. The Supreme court ruling in 2013 merely reinforced this fact since >99% of DNA sequence today is obtained with methods which human modify DNA. [continue reading…]
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).
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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