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Cato on IP

From Nine Lives of Neoliberalism:

The Cato Institute’s suggestions to Congress in the early 2000s recommend “balancing artistic and entrepreneurial incentives to create with the interests of the larger community of users in an unhindered exchange of ideas and products.”

Citing: Cato Institute, Cato Handbook for Congress: Policy Recommendations for the 108th Congress (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2003), 411 [ch. 40 on Intellectual Property].

They take no principled stand against IP. They write instead:

the market alternative to shutdown of file sharing, or targeting individual file swappers, may well be the improvement of digital rights management technologies to protect intellectual property.

and

A good argument can be made … that, in a world without any IP protection, some individuals would be discouraged from producing important goods or ideas (consider pharmaceuticals or genetically altered foods to feed hungry populations). Indeed, those who advocate the abolition of copyright or patent law might ask themselves why the same arguments and reasoning should not be applied to tangible property.

Sad. Their former senior scholar Tom Palmer used to be against IP (I say used to, because in later years he seemed to back-peddle a bit for the case of pharmaceutical patents, after all Cato has some Big Pharma donors),1 and I was invited to a debate there on IP but then disinvited.2 Taco has also had some of its scholars take the wrong position on drug reimportation since this might undermine patent rights.3 I.e., when free markets and free trade conflict with patent rights, these IP socialists favor patents and are willing to sacrifice private property rights, the free market, and free trade. Sad.

I shouldn’t be surprised; this section was co-authored by Adam Thierer, who has no principled (that is, libertarian) opposition to IP.

  1. Cato vs. Public Citizen on IP and the TPP. []
  2. Disinvited From Cato. []
  3. See Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto the Reservation; Epstein on reimportation. []
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Public Goods and Intellectual Property

In his works, Hans-Hermann Hoppe eviscerates the conventional view that there is a clear distinction between public and private goods, and that the state is needed to produce public goods. [continue reading…]

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Martinelli, “On Whether We Own What We Think”

Emanuele Martinelli, “On Whether We Own What We Think” (2019?):

Abstract:

While few argue against the moral and juridical institution of private property altogether, a much more discussed issue is that regarding intellectual property. A notable number of jurists, economists and philosophers, who would defend with no problem the right for individual to own concrete objects in the world exclusively, have nonetheless given little to no justification to legal devices such as copyright norms and patents. This paper will show how the question about intellectual property depends on the view one is willing to embrace about the nature of property and original appropriation.

Among the advocates of private property, Locke’s theory of original appropriation is held as the standard view. After brief exposition of this view and its possible flaws, we will employ Reinach’s insightful terminology for the nature of property to move on to a more Aristotelian-friendly position. In the second part of this work, by examining arguments for and against intellectual property, we will make clear how the standard view hardly offers good reasons to endorse copyright and patents, whereas the proposed alternative does.

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“Patent Politics” by Michael Davis

As I noted in The Morality of Acquiring and Enforcing Patents, law professor Michael Davis (RIP), who also was a registered patent attorney, opposed the patent system (for leftist reasons, I believe, unlike my own pro-property, libertarian reasons). He wrote an interesting article, Patent Politics. I mention him in The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright.

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Why Artists Shouldn’t Own Their Art

“I explain why Intellectual Property rights are actually criminal monopoly grants and why copyrights and patents should be entirely abolished. I debunk every pro-IP argument ever and explain how we will see more technological and artistic development without copyrights and patents.”

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Interesting paper that discusses and relies on my IP work and views on Locke and the labor theory of property:

David Jarrett, “Lockeanism and restitution: What are the implications of a Lockean law of restitution for the contemporary UK?” (Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Politics and International Relations, Submitted for a degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2019).

Abstract: This dissertation sets out a Lockean law of restitution and enquires into some of the implications of this law. It firstly looks into the implications for property redistribution in a case study country – the contemporary UK. It secondly looks into the implications of the law for understanding exploitation in the contemporary UK and historical England until the early industrial era. According to Lockean justice, one owns one’s body and is entitled to fully own previously unowned natural resources one has laboured on. One is also able to transfer one’s property to whom one wishes. We are concerned with the problem of how to address holdings which did not arise in line with Lockean justice. We argue that previous attempts at addressing the problem, including those laid out by Nozick and Rothbard respectively, have been unsatisfactory. We set out a new way of approaching the problem, which we argue is more consistent with Lockean theory. We lay out a Lockean law of restitution inspired by the law of restitution found in the English legal tradition. After laying out the Lockean law of restitution, we look into some implications of the law. Using secondary historical and sociological sources, we argue that all property in the UK is unjustly held according to the Lockean law of restitution and should be redistributed in an egalitarian manner. We secondly argue that wage labour in the contemporary UK is exploitative in Lockean terms, and thirdly, that wage labour can reasonably be presumed to have always been exploitative in England historically. In light of our findings we outline the possibilities for a Lockean approach to property redistribution in the UK.

Related:

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Reflections on Abolitionism: Copyright and Beyond

Leonhard Dobusch, “Reflections on Abolitionism: Copyright and Beyond,” in Governance across Borders: Transnational Fields and Transversal Themes, edited by Leonhard Dobusch, Philip Mader and Sigrid Quack (Cologne: Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, 2013)”1 [continue reading…]

  1. The entry is from this blog post. []
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The Grotesque Legacy of Music as Property

The Grotesque Legacy of Music as Property, by Adam Neely.

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To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to C4SIF. This work is published from: United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a  Creative Commons License Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.