Craig Wright—yes, the Craig Wright whom a UK court found in 2024 is not Satoshi Nakamoto—has followed up his “Price of Ideas” essay, which I responded to here, with two more long Substack attacks on IP abolitionism, and on me in particular.1
Cross-motions for summary judgment on fair use are pending in the consolidated copyright suits against OpenAI and Microsoft in New York, brought by the New York Times and other publishers, Ziff Davis, and authors led by the Authors Guild. OpenAI is touting some 20 filings on its side, including a Justice Department statement of interest and amicus briefs from EFF, Public Knowledge, Authors Alliance, and CCIA, arguing that training AI models on copyrighted works is fair use. The most revealing fight is over “market dilution,” the theory Judge Vince Chhabria floated in Kadrey v. Meta last year: that even if an AI’s outputs infringe nothing, a flood of competing works can still count as market harm to the works it learned from.1 Authors Alliance devoted its entire brief to asking the court to hold that “aggregate competitive pressure from noninfringing outputs” is not cognizable harm, and CCIA calls dilution “an unrecognized and unrealistic theory of harm.” They’re right, but notice what the theory concedes: the complaint is not that anyone copied your work, but that someone else produced new, non-infringing works that people might prefer—that is, competition. As I’ve said for years, IP advocates hate competition, and copyright, like patent, is at bottom a state-granted privilege to suppress it. If courts accept “dilution” as harm, copyright will no longer even pretend to protect expression; it will be an openly protectionist cartel for incumbent authors and publishers, and the only real fix is to abolish it.
In a nonbinding opinion this week in a Hungarian publisher’s suit against Google over its Gemini chatbot, CJEU Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised that when a chatbot retrieves and reuses a news article to answer users, “the press publisher’s right may be infringed in certain circumstances”—for instance, if it gets around a paywall, or if its summaries reuse “the form of expression of that publication in a recognisable manner,” so that users have no need to read the original. To be fair, he also said that facts presented in a substantially different form are not reproductions, and that training AI models on copyrighted works can fall under the EU’s text-and-data-mining exception. But note what is happening: the “press publisher’s right,” created by Article 15 of the EU’s 2019 Copyright Directive (the so-called “link tax”), is a recent invention designed to let newspapers charge Google for showing snippets of their stories, and now it is being stretched to cover AI answers that tell people what the news says. Under this theory, a summary becomes suspect precisely when it is good enough to be useful—that is, when it competes with the original. The complaint, in other words, is not copying but competition, which makes this a European cousin of the old “hot news” doctrine. This is copyright doing what it always does: giving one party a state-granted right to control how others use their own computers, servers, and words. The solution is not to fine-tune the EU’s rules on paywalls and “recognisable” expression, but to abolish copyright and its ever-multiplying offspring, the press publisher’s right included.
The query below, about someone being “called a communist by my boss for expressing my opinion against there being IP at all” reminds me of an encounter I had yesterday. I was leaving Southland Hardware store. My car was parked outside, with my MISES license plate with the Don’t Tread On Me motto and rattlesnake. Two guys were talking outside. One said “Is that your car?” I said yeah. He said “I took a picture of your license plate, hope you don’t mind… say, are you who I think you are?” I said “Probably.” So then he tells me he has read my work and knows an IP lawyer and showed him my anti-IP arguments and the IP lawyer went ballistic and basically said I was the devil. Haha. Good to know.
BTW this is another example of the various ways people find out about new ideas: libertarianism, IP, bitcoin, Austrian econ. You never know which one will lead to the others.
Query:
Subject: Layman questions on IP
… I’m writing you from [South American country] because I’ve recently become very interested in IP and after some research I came across some of your works as well as a few debates. I’ve been talking to people about this issue for some time now and I’m pretty surprised to see how deep rooted everyone’s defense of IP appears to be. Most recently I’ve been called a communist by my boss for expressing my opinion against there being IP at all. I’m reaching out to you because I’m working on a writing that introduces this topic for laypeople like me, and I wanted your take on a few things.
I should clarify I’m not formally trained in any type of law nor in economics. I’m just a guy who really enjoys reading and listening to Sowell and Friedman, and who, after doing enough of the Chicago gateway drug, got more and more into the Austrian stuff and what have you. I must say I’ve always been a skeptical person, if not cynical, but this has been an extremely sobering yet enjoyable experience. I knew some realities are sold to us upside down, but I didn’t know how many of them or how badly so. [continue reading…]
In the recent Advisory Opinions episode “Who’s the Loneliest Supreme Court Justice?” (The Dispatch, Oct. 22, 2026), hosts Sarah Isgur and David French discuss several Supreme Court orders, including one they flag as the case that will have “our libertarian friends jumping from the second-story window.” That order is the grant of certiorari in Department of Justice v. McNutt, the challenge to the nearly 160-year-old federal ban on distilling liquor at home (or in a connected dwelling, shed, or yard).
The ban, codified at 26 U.S.C. § 5178(a)(1)(B) and related provisions, dates to 1868. Congress enacted it as part of a broader scheme to enforce the federal excise tax on distilled spirits. The government’s longstanding justification is that home stills make tax evasion easier: they are harder to inspect, easier to conceal, and more difficult for revenue agents to monitor than commercial facilities. Under the Necessary and Proper Clause, the argument runs, Congress may prohibit the activity outright rather than merely tax it, because the practical difficulty of enforcement otherwise undermines the tax power. [continue reading…]
Abstract: The concept of intellectual property (IP) has been variously criticized
as incompatible with natural rights and detrimental to the dissemination of innovations. In this paper I argue that it can be criticized on an even more fundamental level—namely as a praxeological impossibility. More specifically, it is suggested that since ideas are not economic goods, but preconditions of action, and since physical goods transformed by ideas become as heterogeneous (and thus as intellectually unique) as the individuals who enact such transformations, no economic goods can be meaningfully designated as appropriable in virtue of embodying the objectively definable value of one’s intellectual labor. In view of the above, I subsequently suggest that IP protection laws constitute an exceptionally arbitrary and thus exceptionally disruptive form of interventionism directed against the very essence of the
entrepreneurial market process.
I asked Grok to summarize and provide my analysis in view of my previous comments on a earlier draft. See below. [continue reading…]
Proponents of intellectual property frequently mix together distinct concepts: the different types of IP (patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret), along with fraud, plagiarism, stealing, piracy, contract breach, lying, dishonesty, attribution, and credit. These are not the same thing. I have addressed this confusion at length elsewhere (see the resources below).
A common residual defense of trademark law is that, whatever its excesses, it is at least an attempt to stop fraud. It is not.
Trademark infringement does not require the plaintiff to prove fraud. It requires only a showing of consumer confusion—and not even actual confusion, merely a likelihood of confusion. For famous marks, anti-dilution (blurring or tarnishment) claims do not require likelihood of confusion at all. The cause of action belongs to the trademark holder, not to any customer who was supposedly confused or defrauded. The holder is not the victim. If the concern were genuine fraud, the right to sue would belong to the buyer whose consent was obtained by deception. It does not. [continue reading…]
This video from Fireship explores the trend of reverse-engineering proprietary software, focusing on the recent viral phenomenon where users are essentially making “every app on Earth” open-source.
Key Takeaways:
The Artcraft Project (0:00 – 1:34): A developer named Brandon Thomas rebuilt seven Adobe Creative Cloud applications in Rust after becoming frustrated with Adobe’s subscription model. While these versions are free and run on Linux, the narrator notes they currently lack the polish and performance of the originals.
Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) (0:30 – 4:12): The video introduces a new project called Reverse Engineer Anything (REA), which leverages tools like Ghidra and AI agents to decompile native binaries (like EXE and DLL files) into human-readable code. This allows developers to inspect how specific features work and then reimplement them in their own projects.
Vibe-Driven Development (4:13 – 5:56): The narrator showcases a custom database backend called Studbase, created by reverse-engineering Supabase. The video also highlights Apify, the sponsor, whose MCP (Model Context Protocol) server allows AI agents to connect to thousands of tools—such as scrapers—to automate tasks like tracking social media data.
He indicated he is not quite sure he is agreement with me on IP. I sent him this note:
I am surprised you are not clear on IP. That one is easier to get than argumentation ethics. If you have any kind of understanding of the Austro-libertarian principles of self-ownership, homesteading, and contract, it is not difficult to see that it is impossible to have IP rights; they are utterly and completely incompatible with these libertarian rights. If you want to discuss this on zoom etc, I’d be happy to do so, because this is a very important issue to get right. If you are writing a comprehensive, systematic, and rigorous treatment of libertarian principles, you must cover this topic and get it right. Don’t be like David Friedman, Michael Huemer, J.C. Lester, who are weak on this terribly important issue.1
See David Rode, “Murphy Brown: Why The Popular ’80s Sitcom Is Impossible To Stream,” TV Line (Sept. 20, 2026). Anyone who is in favor of copyright and also a fan of Murphy Brown or any other show that can’t be accessed now due to these problems–kwitcher bitchin’.
Wow. h/t @gregmorin “One for the “copyright destroys culture” files. Tv show lost due to intractable IP rights.”
No offense, Objectivists and fascist pro-IP “libertarians”
https://t.co/NtSPVpFglo nb @jeffreytucker
Here’s Why You Can’t Stream ‘Murphy Brown’ (Decider, 2018) — music rights plus the fact that Warner Bros., not CBS, produced it, so it was never in the CBS All Access library.
I formed the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) back in October 20131 to separate my libertarian-related anti-IP writings from my other IP writings and to form a center dedicated to freedom and innovation. As our mission statement in the sidebar clearly states:
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.
In other words, we are against IP because we are in favor of innovation and property rights, and freedom, liberty, and justice. We are not against IP just for the hell of it, but because we recognize that IP law violates property rights, is unjust, commits aggression, restricts human freedom, impedes and distorts innovation, creativity, free expression, artistic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. [continue reading…]
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. [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.
We provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation perspective.
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