In a recent Human Action podcast episode, “Why Are US Drug Prices So High?,” Bob Murphy and Alexander Tabarrok discuss drug prices, President Trump’s recent “Executive Order: Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients,” and related policy like patent law. (See also Trump’s “Worst Idea”: Undercutting Patent-Inflated Monopoly Pharmaceutical Patents.)

Their shownotes: [continue reading…]

In S1:E7 of the TV series Doc, the main character, Dr. Amy Larsen, has to take the medical boards again because of an accident giving her amnesia. Preparing for the boards, she recited part of the modern, 1964 Hippocratic Oath:

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

An admirable, implicitly anti-IP sentiment. Which some doctors seem to thwart by filing patents on medical procedures–seeking to block other doctors from using the knowledge they have to treat patients. [continue reading…]

[From my Webnote series]

I have pointed out that in case of disputes over the use of scarce (conflictable) resources (means of human action) other than one’s body, property rights principles are used to determine the owner of the contested resource. (In the case of one’s body, the principle of presumptive self- or body-ownership is used.) Thus, as noted in Aggression and Property Rights Plank in the Libertarian Party Platform: [continue reading…]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 466.

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Intellectual property is totally incompatible with libertarian principles and property rights, principled libertarians, especially Austrian and Mises-influenced ones should know.¹

This follows clearly from libertarian property principles as laid out in the LP Platform (Plank 2.1), which makes it clear that the aggression opposed by libertarians is defined in terms of property rights, which are based on self-ownership of one’s body and, for previously unowned external scarce resources, by the principles of original appropriation, contractual acquisition, and transfers to effectuate rectification for torts/crimes: [continue reading…]

1. See my “The Problem with Intellectual Property ” (2025), Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) [LFFS], Part IV, and You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (2023). [↩]

Property rights are not derived from anything. They don’t have a source. They are norms, quite useful norms, and norms that can be justified–but hardly need to be as most people already accept their utility and justification. Who that uses property they homesteaded, or purchased…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) May 31, 2025

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[From my Webnote series]

From my various posts and writing.

Related:

• Libertarian and Lockean Creationism: Creation As a Source of Wealth, not Property Rights; Hayek’s “Fund of Experience”
• A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”

Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant:

To provide an insufficient summary, Tibor basically tried to argue that there are ontologically various kinds of “things” that “exist”—poems, trucks, etc. And since “The tangible-intangible distinction is not a good one for what can and cannot be owned”, then we need to focus on “intentionality”–things we intentionally create or produce, whether they be “tangible” or “intangible.” Indeed, that intangible things like poems, computer games/programs, novels, songs, arrangements, etc. are more completely “intentional” and “created” than are tangible goods. I.e., Tibor’s theory seems to be that any “ontological type of thing” that we can identify, and that was intentionally created or produced by man, is owned by man.

I think this is flawed for a number of reasons, as I have pointed out elsewhere.¹ Naming a thing conceptually does not prove there is some “ontological type of thing that exists and can be owned”; this would be to conflate concepts adopted for conceptual utility with real, existing things. It would be a type of reification. But I also don’t think Tibor thought he had figured this issue out completely. Again, he was sincerely struggling with a difficult issue—trying to figure things out, trying to find out the best way to understand liberty and rights.
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1. See this post, and comments: Trademark Ain’t So Hot Either…; Trademark and Fraud (and comments in the Mises blog); Owning Thoughts and Labor; A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”; and New Working Paper: Machan on IP, including the criticism and discussion in the comments, such as those of Carl Johan Petrus Ridenfeldt at November 30, 2006 4:59 PM). [↩]

Every legal system has some type of property rights scheme.

As I point out in my book, “Protection of and respect for property rights is thus not unique to libertarianism. Every legal system defines and enforces some property rights system. What is distinctive about…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) May 28, 2025

This pro-IP dude “Rock” says sarcastically “Yes because property rights are totally socialist”. My reply: [continue reading…]

Makes a non-rigorous distinction between “invention” and “innovation” (much like some people make non-rigorous distinctions between “discovery” and “invention” (Ayn Rand, if I recall) and between “ideas” and “expressions of ideas” or “particular instances of/instantiations of” ideas¹ ), but still interesting.

See also:

• Masnick on Innovation vs. Invention
• Study: Most Important Innovations Are Not Patented
• Jared Diamond on Inventors and Innovation
• Enski, Patent Dystopia, How the Patent System Strangled Innovation, Job Creation and the Economy
• Jared Diamond on Inventors and Innovation

11 types of cross-industry innovation

1. IP isn’t about owning ideas; those who oppose ownership of ideas are commies.  [↩]

A friend pointed me to novelist Scott Sigler’s podcast episode DEEP CUTS Episode 49: Should Copyright be Abolished? In it, he discusses Musk and Dorsey’s suggestion to abolish copyright. As a novelist, naturally he is pro-copyright. I tried to listen but could only bear it for about 20 minutes. Almost ever other sentence was confused nonsense, providing yet another example of Brandolini’s Law. I can’t even.

So I got ChatGPT to do it. See below. [continue reading…]

I recently had a twitter conversation with economist Sanjeev Sabhlok (@sabhlok). See, e.g.:

Thank you so much. Look forward to learning more about this complex and highly contested issue. https://t.co/O3HvbAWnOB

— Sanjeev Sabhlok (@sabhlok) May 13, 2025

He wrote me that he had looked into the issue further . See e.g. his tweet: [continue reading…]

I found some interesting commentary in James E. Penner, The Idea of Property in Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). (Ironically, this treatise is quoted favorably by pro-IP libertarian law professor Eric R. Claeys, Natural Property Rights (Cambridge U. Press, 2025), §4.2, p. 77. ) I will provide some quotes and then some takeaways. I have omitted footnotes; note the bolded text in particular: [continue reading…]

Someone on Twitter posted this document (pdf).

Hi Stephan, I know you are a big objector to Intellectual Property. And I would be glad if you would review my argument against the existence of Intellectual Property. I formulated an argument with formal logic (using modal operators and model theory). (1/2)

— franco (@catalaxiaaa) May 22, 2025

Not sure I can follow it as I have never liked or found symbolic logic useful at all, esp. for arguments like this which I believe require words and the richness of language and concepts. But here it is FWIW. [continue reading…]