My article “Defamation Law and Reputation Rights as a Type of Intellectual Property” was originally slated to appear in Elvira Nica & Gheorghe H. Popescu, eds., A Passion for Justice: Essays in Honor of Walter Block (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, forthcoming) but has been withdrawn and will be published elsewhere in September 2024. A pre-print draft is available here (pdf).

For previous arguments against defamation law, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Knowledge, True and False,” in The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and Walter E. Block, “The Slanderer and Libeler,” in Defending the Undefendable (2018). [continue reading…]

Mike Masnick of TechDirt, generally pro-civil liberties and generally skeptical of copyright but not an abolitionist, just put up a podcast episode he appeared on discussing free speech versus copyright and the censorship copyright law causes. This was an episode of the podcast “Sidebar by Courthouse News” called Copyright Conundrum, and re-podcast on Techdirt by Masnick. The shownotes: [continue reading…]

“Patents, Pharma, Government: The Unholy Alliance,” Brownstone Institute (April1, 2024)

Jesus. Another confused self-proclaimed advocate of liberty advocating statist censorship in the name of intellectual property,¹ just like other so-called libertarians have advocated restricting free trade for the same reasons.²

Adam Mossoff, “Congress Should Protect the Rights of American Creators with Site-Blocking Legislation” (Feb. 14, 2023). Look how many time he equates IP with normal property rights,³ and invokes the “fruits of their productive labors” misleading metaphor. Thanks, Locke, for the huge mistake.⁴ And also, he says:

“Unfortunately, a subset of libertarians—who advocate for anarchism in the physical world and in the digital domain of the internet—have created confusion about the protection of copyrighted works on the internet.

1. Others include Reason’s moron writer Cathy Young. See, e.g., Reason: Copyright Should Last Half A Century; Libraries: Prepare to burn foreign books, courtesy copyright law; COICA: More Copyright-Backed Censorship on the Way?; “SOPA, Piracy, Censorship and the End of the Internet? Kinsella and Stefan Molyneux on Freedomain Radio”; Copyright and Free Trade; Patents and Censorship”; Copyright Censorship versus Free Speech and Human Rights; Excessive Fines and the Eighth Amendment.” [↩]
2. Such as Richard Epstein, Doug Bandow, Michael Krauss, and now, embarrassingly and pathetically, David Henderson. See Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto the Reservation; Pilon on Patents; Cato on Drug Reimportation; Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto the Reservation; and Other Posts; Intellectual Property and Think Tank Corruption. And let’s not forget William Shughart writing in favor of IP for the Independent Institute. See Independent Institute on The “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection. [↩]
3. I criticize this, e.g., in “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” Part. IV.I, in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023). [↩]
4. Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory: Transcript. [↩]
5. An Objectivist Recants on IP; Yet another Randian recants on IP; “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism.” [↩]
6. See More defenses of IP by the Federalist Society; Independent Institute on The “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection; others here.  [↩]

At Tom Woods’s wedding reception in June 2022, in Jacksonville, Florida, I ran into Mark Skousen and we ended up having a discussion about intellectual property, which we continued later in an email discussion. Gene Epstein was also included since Mark had also made some comments about IP in the aftermath of my Soho Forum debate with Richard Epstein in Nov. 2021 (which Gene Epstein hosts).

I thought my comments to Mark about IP might be of interest to some readers, to show how I sometimes respond to common queries about and arguments in favor of IP, so below I reprint a lightly edited and somewhat cleaned up version of our (casual, informal) interchange (reprinted with Mark and Gene’s permission, ‘natch). [continue reading…]

Duke economist Michael Munger had some comments about copyright and intellectual property (IP) and fraud, plagiarism, and related topics, in a recent AIER column, “Property in Words: Not Even Under Suspicion,” AIER (Jan. 14, 2024). He basically seems to be skeptical of the idea of copyright, based on his skepticism of words as property, but he never quite comes out and says so. In the end he comes out against dishonesty and plagiarism, but the analysis is somewhat all over the map and makes various misstatements about the nature of IP law and property rights.

In general, the IP topic and property rights in general is so rife with confusion that almost every analysis is always somewhat … off. In part, this is because people are confused due to Locke’s mistake of basing his property arguments on the labor theory of property,¹ and in part because of confusion about how to separate or combine legal/normative/prescriptive and economic/factual/descriptive analysis. And any terms are used with somewhat different meanings, across domains of inquiry, that equivocation often creeps in. [continue reading…]

1. See KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory. [↩]

A friend asked me for my comments about a video with the clickbaity title “Harvard Economist Reveals Shocking SECRET About China In 2023“—in particular, regarding the third section, “Fierce Competition,” about how China handles IP vs. the U.S. My brief, dashed off response is below:

Well, the title of this video makes it look click-baity. I think he is confused. Here are my thoughts just from quickly watching the first few minutes of that section. [continue reading…]