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“All property is fundamentally intellectual.”

Adapted from my Tweet.

Replying to a previous tweet, which stated: “All property is fundamentally intellectual.” This is the Objectivist bait and switch. All property involves the intellect–the mind, rationality, decisions, ideas. Sure. All property involves labor too. Why not say all property is labor? You need to start with a definition. What do you mean by property? [continue reading…]

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Copyright reform is necessary for national security

Anna’s Blog argues that “Copyright reform is necessary for national security“. The argument is that American companies are hobbled in using copyright-protected works (such as that on Anna’s Archive) to train their AI LLM models, but Chinese firms have no such compunctions. Thus, US copyright law should be modified to make it easier for American AI companies to use this data to train their AIs—for example by reducing the copyright term and providing other safe harbors.

It’s a pretty flimsy and unprincipled argument, and somewhat nationalistic, and seems unaware of many other proposals for IP reform (and abolition), e.g. my own anti-IP work (e.g. You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property), proposals for reform such as “How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law” and those by others such as Tom Bell (Tom Bell on copyright reform; the Hayekian knowledge problem and copyright terms).

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Libertarian and IP Answer Man: Artificial Intelligence and IP

I received a couple questions from someone about IP and AI.

Question 1:

we could imagine an AI system without any censorship which can quote anything without any restrictions and provide access to any information that is available, anyone could create a website with any pirate content they want and it uses modern technologies allowing to provide this service without any way blocking it. How long IP could exist if there was a tool that completely ignores human made laws and lets information live freely?

Kinsella:

I’m not quite sure what you are asking. I think copyright is incompatible with AI. You can’t have both. That’s the problem with copyright. It’s already affecting AI. See, re Sarah Silverman’s suit against OpenAI, “AI Suffers Setback As Judge Trims Case“; and “The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work” (“Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said”).

Response:

Obviously OpenAI is affected by the government regulations, I am talking about black market version of it, that doesn’t care about made up laws and acts strictly within voluntary cooperation. The question is: if there was a distributed system (kind of like bitcoin is) that couldn’t be blocked by the government and allowed using AI without any restrictions, how in your opinion would it change the mindset of the people regarding copyright?

Kinsella:

Hard to say. Probably not much. They are too confused about IP and copyright to start to understand it just because of some obvious examples. Instead they would (a) minimize the example and focus on how the unregulated blackmarket AI is also being used for bad things (it might give racist answers etc., or “for crime,” like Bitcoin or The Silk Road) and (b) they would say, “well this just means copyright law is being abused here and all we need to do is find the right ‘balance.'” No one can ever think in principled terms.

After all think of how copyright obviously hobbles Youtube, but no one says we should abolish copyright because of this. They just moan about “abuse” and say the system needs to be tweaked or improved or fixed to achieve the right “balance.” It gets tedious to hear this nonsense over and over.

So I expect copyright to continue to hobble AI (patents might too; see how nChain/Craig Wright tried to use both copyright and patents, maybe trademark too, I can’t recall, as threats against the bitcoin ecosystem).1 This will mean it will have reduced functionality and it will be more expensive as the AI companies are extorted into paying ransom in the form of “license fees” to book publishers, newspapers, and others with content on the Internet. It’s going to hold back human progress, as IP always does. No offense, Heritage Foundation, Cato, Independent Institute, Federalist Society, and others.2

Question 2:

Intellectual property is one of the most fascinating and, at the same time, controversial concepts created by the state to regulate interactions between people. The term itself is essentially an oxymoron because ideas, knowledge, or creative expressions cannot be “owned” in the same sense as physical objects. You cannot restrict the spread of a thought once it enters someone else’s mind. Yet the state has invented rules that allow this to happen through coercion, restrictions, and penalties.

True property is based on the principle of self-ownership: you own your body and, therefore, the fruits of your labor if they are created without violating the rights of others. But can it truly be considered a violation to “copy” an idea that someone has heard or seen? If I create a copy of your book or invent a similar machine, does that really harm your property? After all, the original remains with you, and you have not lost anything. This contradicts the very nature of property, which aims to avoid conflict over scarce resources.

The system of intellectual “property” benefits only those who wish to use coercion for profit: corporations, states, and bureaucrats. Authors, inventors, or artists receive only an illusion of protection, which quickly shatters against the reality of lawsuits, patent trolls, and bureaucratic obstacles. In contrast, true freedom of creativity and innovation comes from open systems where ideas freely circulate and enrich society.

Everyone who creates something in this world has the right to decide how and with whom to share their work. If your ideas are truly valuable, you will find those willing to support you voluntarily. But imposing a monopoly on thought is an attack on the freedom of others, on their right to use their own minds, to create, and to share their ideas.

Thus, the issue of intellectual property is ultimately a question of freedom versus coercion. A free society does not need state patents or copyrights. It needs a space for collaboration where people create, copy, improve, and freely exchange ideas without fear of bureaucracy or legal sanctions.

Kinsella:

This is not bad, and it’s aiming at the right answer. There are few things I would tweak.

First, a pedantic point. You write: “the issue of intellectual property is ultimately a question of freedom versus coercion”. We libertarians oppose aggression; libertarians sometimes use “coercion” as a synonym for aggression, just like we sometimes (sloppily) say that we oppose “violence.” But not all coercion is aggression, just like not all force or violence is aggression. See my posts The Problem with “Coercion” and The State is not the government; we don’t own property; scarcity doesn’t mean rare; coercion is not aggression.

Second, you write: “True property is based on the principle of self-ownership: you own your body and, therefore, the fruits of your labor if they are created without violating the rights of others.”

Here, you speak of “true property.” As one legal scholar explains,

In the United States, the word property is frequently used to denote indiscriminately either the objects of rights … or the rights that persons have with respect to things. Thus, lands, automobiles, and jewels are said to be property; and rights, such as ownership, servitudes, and leases, are likewise said to be property. This latent confusion between rights and their objects has its roots in texts of Roman law and is also encountered in other legal systems of the western world. Accurate analysis should reserve the use of the word property for the designation of rights that persons have with respect to things. (( See Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) [LFFS], ch. 2, App. I. ))

So the question is not what “is property” but what human actors have property rights to. As Rothbard explains, all (human) rights just are property rights; and all property rights are rights in scarce resources.3 And to be just—according to libertarianism and the private law—these property rights must assigned in accordance with (1) original appropriation (occupation; Lockean homesteading) or (2) contractual title transfer from a previous owner.4

I would also slightly disagree with your wording: “you own your body and, therefore, the fruits of your labor if they are created without violating the rights of others”. We do not own labor, or the “fruits of” our labor. We own previously-owned scarce resources acquired either by original appropriation or by contractual title transfer from the previous owner. Neither one of these actions “creates” the “thing” owned, nor do they require the assumption that an actor owns of the “fruits of his labor”. When an actor appropriates or occupies an unowned resource, he does not create it; it already existed; he merely appropriates it. Yes, yes, this effort involves the use of labor (and intellect, knowledge, and so on), but the labor is merely a type of action (as opposed to leisure); labor is not owned, and neither is “action” or “leisure.”5

It is true that laboring—rearranging an already-owned resource—is a source of wealth but not of property rights.6

In light of all this, I would also say that the problem with IP is not that ideas “are not property.” Even scarce resources are not “property”; as noted above, humans have property rights in scarce resources (determined in accordance with original appropriation and contractual transfer). The thing that I own is not “property”; it is something in which I have a property (ownership) right.

The problem with IP is not that ideas are “not property” or that IP is “not property”; the problem with IP law and the IP rights it creates, is that that IP rights violate existing property rights—since IP gives ownership rights to IP holders, over resources already owned by others in accordance with principles of original appropriation and contractual transfer. IP rights and IP law are unjustThis is the fundamental problem with IP rights.7

As I pointed out in “Intellectual Property versus Intellectual Property Rights“:

One mistake made by many opponents of IP is that they believe the problem with IP is that it is “not property,” which is one reason they are reluctant to adopt the loaded term “intellectual property.” But this is because they still hew to the common view that things we have property rights in “are property.” If they believe that IP law is illegitimate, this means that “intellectual property” is not actually “property”; that there is no such thing as “intellectual property”; or as some of them say, “intellectual property does not exist.” As this chapter will make clear, the problem with IP is not that it does not exist, but that IP rights and IP law are unjust. Inventions and creative works exist; patents and copyrights, and patent and copyright law, exist. The opponents of IP here remind me a bit of the natural law types who resist calling a bad law “law” but instead say things like, an unjust law is no law at all.

(See also my similar comments in “Munger on Property Rights in Words and Information.”)

  1. Announcing the Open Crypto Alliance to Protect Bitcoin, Blockchain and Crypto; various tweets by . []
  2. Adam Mossoff, “The Patent System: America’s Innovation Engine,” Heritage Foundation Report (Jan. 23, 2025); see also Kinsella, “Independent Institute on The ‘Benefits’ of Intellectual Property Protection,” C4SIF Blog (Feb. 15, 2016). []
  3. LFFS, ch. 4, text at n.2. []
  4. See LFFS, ch. 4, 5, 9, et pass.; Kinsella, “Aggression and Property Rights Plank in the Libertarian Party Platform.” []
  5. See my posts Cordato and Kirzner on Intellectual Property; L ch. 11, text at n.33. []
  6. See LFFS, ch. 14, Part III.B; ch. 15, Part IV.C; Kinsella, “Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property,” StephanKinsella.com (June 23, 2010); idem, “KOL 037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory,” Kinsella on Liberty Podcast (March 28, 2013).  []
  7. Kinsella, “Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes” (June 23, 2011). []
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Morin on Patents (2013)

I just recalled that my friend Greg years ago posted a nice broadside against patents “Ideas Are Not Property, On Dismantling IP,” in The Independent Political Report, back in June 2013. As he opens:

The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously this past week that human genes may not be patented. That was a good decision. However those in support of this ruling are by and large hypocrites. They vociferously decried the negative consequences of upholding such patents (limiting research, higher costs, limited choice) but then fail to acknowledge these same deleterious consequences occur for ALL patents. It’s not like these bad things don’t occur for “legitimate” patents but do occur for “illegitimate” ones. Patents are the problem, not their “legitimacy.”

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Intellectual Property versus Intellectual Property Rights

I’m writing “The Problem with Intellectual Property,” to appear in Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics, 2nd ed., Christoph Lütge & Marianne Thejls Ziegler, eds. (Springer, forthcoming 2025; Robert McGee, section ed.). (My “The Case Against Intellectual Property,” a different article, appeared in the first edition, Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics (Prof. Dr. Christoph Lütge, ed.; Springer, 2013) (chapter 68, in Part 18, “Property Rights: Material and Intellectual,” Robert McGee, section ed.).)

One of my footnotes is becoming unwieldy and I will have to pare it down, so I include the full version here, as I have trouble killing my darlings. [continue reading…]

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I received this email last night:

Hello ! I hope this message finds you well!

I’m reaching out to share my recently published book: Patent Dystopia, How the Patent System Strangled Innovation, Job Creation and the Economy

I believe you will find the themes in my book both relevant and thought-provoking, even if you don’t end up agreeing with every point.

I think it complements your work in meaningful ways, and I even quote and cite of your books, “Against Intellectual Property” [continue reading…]

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Mossoff’s Recommended Criticisms of Intellectual Property

On Twitter, someone asked pro-IP Objectivist law professor Adam Mossoff for recommendations for IP-skeptical writing from a pro-market and pro-industry perspective. (See also related tweets from Garett Jones and Jacob Huebert)

Shea Levy @shlevy

@AdamMossoff
do you have a recommended resource for the generally market/industry-friendly but IP-skeptical type?

I’m not sure if Mossoff understood the questions (but I doubt that), since he replied with a list of apparently pro-IP writings (I haven’t gone through them yet; will fisk this later): [continue reading…]

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KOL452 | Ethics, Politics, and IP for Engineering Students

KOL452 | Ethics, Politics, and IP for Engineering Students

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 452.

I was asked recently to guest lecture for a course taught to some mechanical engineering students at Colorado University Boulder (EMEN 4100: Engineering Economics) by the lecturer, David Assad. Assad covers some ethics related matters in the latter part of the course and asked me to talk generally about ethics and related matters. I discussed ethics, morality, politics, and science. I discussed ethics and its relationship to science and politics, and discussed about what science is, the types of sciences, ethics and ethical theories and the relationship to specialized ethics and morality in general, and its relationship to political ethics and political philosophy. I then discussed libertarianism in general, the nature and function of property rights, and then explained how the intellectual property issue can be addressed based on the libertarian and private law perspective. The references and notes I gave the class are embedded in the slides and reproduced below.

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