by Stephan Kinsella
on August 19, 2026
[PFS cross-post]
Excellent recent column: Adam Haman, “Copyright’s Dirty Secret: It Was Born in the Inquisition,” Haman Nature (Jul 30, 2026).
Related
- Philip Bodeswell, “How To Create A Flying Monkey: Movement: Hint: It’s Not Magic,” The Narcissist State (Aug 19, 2026) (linked in the comments)
- Re the comments on “When monopoly claims reach the body”: See Kinsella, Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes: “The fact that IP law gives the wielder a negative servitude over the property, and even bodies, of others, shows that IP can also resemble slavery. I pointed this out in Against Intellectual Property (see text at n 94); as does Tom Palmer, “Intellectual Property: A Non-Posnerian Law and Economics Approach,” p. 281; and Palmer, “Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects,” pp. 828-29, 831, 862, 864–65; and Roderick Long (Owning Ideas Means Owning People; The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights). Palmer notes that William Leggett also “argued that such rights were in reality statutory monopolies that infringed upon the rights of others to the ownership of their own bodies”. Palmer, Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified?,” p. 828–29; see also my post William Leggett on Intellectual Property.”
- Kinsella, Rothbard on Mercantilism and State “Patents of Monopoly”
- ——, The Problem with Intellectual Property
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In my journey from political blank slate, to rejecting both Democrats and Republicans, to embracing Randian minarchist libertarianism, and then (six months later, as the joke goes) full anarchism, my biggest stumbling block wasn’t the roads (ha ha) or even the police, courts, or military.
Nope, it was so-called “intellectual property (IP).”
Indoctrinated as I was, I couldn’t see how creativity and productivity could exist without patent and copyright protections. Worse, I thought IP was good and true, just and moral, as Rand (and my college professors) insisted. [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on August 17, 2026
[Cross-posted at PFS]
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged there is a famous scene when a series of irrational mistakes lead to the Taggart Comet disaster. It is caused when railroad officials, under political pressure from a powerful passenger and unwilling to take responsibility, ordered the Comet into an eight-mile mountain tunnel with an unsafe coal-burning locomotive instead of a diesel. The train stalled from the fumes, passengers and crew asphyxiated, and an oncoming Army munitions train crashed into it, triggering an explosion that permanently sealed the tunnel. The catastrophe resulted from the broader collapse of competence and judgment under collectivist policies that had driven capable people out of the system.
Rand’s description in effect blames the victim-passengers for sharing the irrational views that led to it. She starts out:
It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
[continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on August 15, 2026
[From my Webnote series]
Ported here from Kinsella, “The Patent, Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Secret Horror Files,” StephanKinsella.com (Feb. 3, 2010)
As noted here, “Ayn Rand’s newsletters used to end with a “Horror File” of monstrous but true quotations.”
Along those lines, it’s time to collect some choice trademark horror stories in one place. The main post will be here, on the Mises Blog, but I’ll cross-post the initial post here too. But look there for updates (or to add suggestions in the comments). (Update: I might as well also list here similar examples from patent, copyright, and even trade secret. See below.)
For examples related to defamation, see Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property. [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on August 15, 2026
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Apple the Monopolist,” Mises Economics Blog (01/28/2010) (archived comments below)
January 28, 2010 9:18 AM by Jeffrey Tucker (Archive)
Apple’s products seem light years ahead of the competition. By the time the competition starts getting vaguely close to making a product that approximates its excellence and elegance, Apple announces the new thing that is more astonishing than ever, and the whole thing starts again.
This came home to me this last week when I once again tried the Sony Reader, only to realize (once again) that it is nowhere close to being as good a reader as the iPhone itself, which is a product miles and miles ahead of the hundreds of phones you see lined up at Wal-Mart or Verizon. The same is true in laptops. [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on August 15, 2026
Nicholas Snow “The Three Stages of Invention,” Mises Daily (07/20/2006).
Archived comments below.
Nicholas Snow “The Three Stages of Invention,” Mises Daily (07/20/2006).
Frédéric Bastiat is considered by many to be one of the greatest economic journalists of all time.[1] However, it has been argued that he also made far more important contributions to the science of economics than most economists realize. Various current issues could benefit greatly from many of the ideas put forth in his writings. One such issue is that of intellectual property. His belief in the importance of competition leads one to conclude that a naturally harmonious economy is only possible when the economic laws are undisturbed.[2] Though Bastiat wrote very little about patents, his position against them can be strengthened by much of his writings. [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on August 11, 2026
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by Stephan Kinsella
on August 10, 2026
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “The Copyright/Baseball Analogy,” Mises Economics Blog (11/14/2006). Archived comments below.
My friend Carl Horowitz writes a good piece urging Hollywood to join the film pirates rather than fight them [Link broken. Closest I could find is Carl Horowitz, “Hollywood: Land of Libertarianism,” TownHall (Dec 05, 2009). —SK]. He is surely right about this. Film downloads cannot be stopped, but the premise of his article is that if they could be stopped, they should be stopped.
He makes an analogy to baseball. He says that defending piracy as a right is like saying that “so long as there are empty seats at a major league baseball game, there’s nothing wrong with crashing the gates. After all, my freebie neither affects the game’s outcome nor diminishes anyone’s revenues or salaries. Plus, by telling my friends about the game, I am widening the audience for baseball.” [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on July 31, 2026
Interesting piece by Len D. Pozeram, “The Great Intellectual Property Bubble and the Coming Reckoning for Western Economies,” Libertarian Alliance (UK) (31 July, 2026):
Since the early 1990s, Western economies have undergone a complete and perilous transformation. They have shifted from systems centered on the production of tangible goods to ones dominated by the extraction of rents through finance and intellectual property. Factories and machine tools gave way to platforms and algorithms, both resting on legal monopolies. Wealth came to be measured less by what nations manufactured than by the soaring market capitalizations of technology companies whose primary assets consisted of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and proprietary data. This was presented as the inevitable triumph of the “knowledge economy.” In reality, it represented a dangerous wager: that legal privileges and financial engineering could indefinitely substitute for genuine productive capacity. [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on July 19, 2026
I have pointed out before that patent and copyright law have only gotten worse over time, almost never better, except by some occasional judicial interpretations of the patent and copyright statutes, which is inevitable since these so-called “IP” laws grant artificial, unjust, and nonobjective IP rights. The copyright term has increased from 14/28 years to well over 100; criminal penalties have been added; and its scope has increased to cover software, video, and so on even though the Constitution only speaks of “writings.”
The only exceptions that come to mind is that for copyright, the DMCA, and for defamation, the CDA, gave platforms/ISPs some protection from liability for infringing/defamatory acts of users (see Grok summary).
And for patent, AIA’s expansion of the prior commercial user defense in 2011, and 1997 limits on enforcement of patents on surgery procedures.
A recent IPWatchdog podcast, Patent Damages on Trial: Rule 702 and the Daubert Conundrum (July 18, 2026) (transcript below) discusses recent changes to how damages can be proved in patent infringement litigation. It’s hosted by patent shill and buffoon Gene Quinn and includes a bunch of legal positivist, mainstream patent lawyers etc.
They are whining in part about how difficult the federal courts are making it to “scientifically” prove damages. For example, suppose you make a phone that has some chip that uses a technique that slightly speeds up computation time or slightly increases battery efficiency, and this allegedly infringes a patent on this technique or circuit. Suppose the phone sells for $700. How much of that $700 is “attributable” to the tiny component? Nobody knows, or can know; the question is ill defined and unanswerable. But you have to give an answer, since you have to “apportion” damages somehow. The panelists below discuss the “the 25% rule”—the previous rules that posited that a reasonable royalty is roughly 25% of the infringer’s expected profits—originated in a non-representative sample of mid-20th-century Swiss chemical licenses and had no scientific foundation, which was rejected by the Federal Circuit in Uniloc USA, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 632 F.3d 1292 (Fed. Cir. 2011), as failing the reliability requirements of Daubert and Rule 702 (Grok elaboration). [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on July 16, 2026
From PFS Blog: Fhoer: The Death of Physical Media: The Digital Panopticon and the Attack on Property
From @Fhoer_here, “The Death of Physical Media,” Fhoer’s Substack (July 16, 2026): “The Digital Panopticon and the Attack on Property.” According to the author: The end of physical media can be blamed on IP laws…
The planned obsolescence of physical media and the forced migration to cloud storage are often celebrated as the pinnacle of modern logistical convenience. The illusion of a frictionless world is sold, where entire libraries and collections fit in the palm of your hand. However, behind this supposed logistical utopia, a profound reconfiguration of property rights is at work. The disappearance of the physical format is not merely a technological advancement, but a structural maneuver designed to make it difficult for individuals to maintain their own collections, separate from the network and beyond the reach of state-corporate scrutiny and control.
To understand the gravity of this movement, it is imperative to observe the problem through the lens of intellectual property criticism. In a natural order, the concept of property applies exclusively to scarce goods, that is, physical resources over which conflicts may arise, such as a piece of land, a printed book, or a hard drive. Information, in turn, is not scarce; thus, the act of copying a file does not deprive the original author of its ownership.
Read more>>
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by Stephan Kinsella
on July 15, 2026
Max C. Sterling, “Property: What Is It?,” Exit Now (June 28, 2026). Nice piece. Grok summary of the article and our interchange below.
Related
Note: Some references (e.g., book chapters or exact post URLs) are based on standard locations on stephankinsella.com. Links point to primary sources where available.
Summary of the blog post “Property: What Is It?” (by Max C. Sterling, Exit Now, June 28, 2026)
The post argues that property is fundamentally a conflict-avoiding norm arising from the reality of scarcity (rivalrous goods where use by one person precludes use by another). Without scarcity, there is no need for property rules. Its purpose is to resolve disputes over scarce resources in a just, objective way, enabling peaceful social cooperation (quoting Hoppe on this). [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on July 13, 2026
- Justices reject billion-dollar judgment for copyright infringement by internet service provider
- Cox Communications v. Sony Entertainment
- RIAA Statement on Supreme Court Decision in Cox Case: “We are disappointed in the Court’s decision vacating a jury’s determination that Cox Communications contributed to mass scale copyright infringement, based on overwhelming evidence that the company knowingly facilitated theft. To be effective, copyright law must protect creators and markets from harmful infringement and policymakers should look closely at the impact of this ruling. The Court’s decision is narrow, applying only to ‘contributory infringement’ cases involving defendants like Cox that do not themselves copy, host, distribute, or publish infringing material or control or induce such activity.”
- MPA Statement on Supreme Court Ruling in Cox Communications vs. Sony Music Entertainment (March 25, 2026):WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court today issued a ruling in the case of Cox Communications vs. Sony Music Entertainment. The following is a statement from Karyn Temple, Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel for the Motion Picture Association.
“We are disappointed in today’s Supreme Court decision, which upends the critical legal doctrine of contributory infringement for copyright that has served as a key factor fostering cooperation between rightsholders, internet service providers, and other online intermediaries. As the Supreme Court had previously observed, secondary liability, including contributory infringement, is ‘the only practical alternative’ for addressing widespread online theft. Unfortunately, the Court’s opinion today ignores this well-established rule and congressional intent, which is particularly disappointing amidst a growing consensus about the need for more accountability for facilitating harmful online conduct, not less. Despite today’s ruling, the MPA will continue to use all available legal tools to protect our members’ valuable intellectual property and the over 2 million American jobs our industry supports.”
None of this is a surprise. The Copyright fascists will never stop.
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by Stephan Kinsella
on June 26, 2026
Per Bylund, “Intellectual Property versus the Unrealized,” Mises Wire (06/25/2026) (below).
Related
Per links in this article to his article “Ozempic Sat Unused for Decades Because Invention Is Not Enough,” The Daily Economy (June 25, 2026) (“Pfizer knew GLP-1s worked in 1990, but didn’t see their potential. The 30-year detour shows entrepreneurship matters as much as raw invention.”). This is also good, but a couple quibbles. In a few places he refers to ideas being “stolen”:
Business history is filled with cases in which inventors appear to have been deprived of the rewards of their discoveries. Many great inventions were, in some sense, stolen ideas commercialized by someone other than their inventors. … Some unethical behavior, fraud, exploitation, and outright stealing certainly does exist in these stories.
He links to 10 famous inventions that come from stolen ideas and The epic, decades-long battle between Ford and a small-time inventor. The latter gives the example of Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and showed it to Ford, who then allegedly “stole” it from Kearns. But as I have pointed out, it is impossible to “steal” ideas; ideas cannot be owned. Loaded terms like theft, stealing, ripping off, pirating, even “taking” are all inaccurate and imprecise. In a free market and a free society, peaceful activities like learning, copying, emulating, and competing are of course permissible as of right. It is true that in our quasi-statist world, the statist positive law corrupts natural, organic, evolved private law, which involves only offenses that are malum in se, with artificial fiat legislation, which creates offenses which are merely malum prohibitum. So copying someone’s idea is not “stealing” at all, even if the corrupt, legislated fiat law makes it an offense. But this is still not theft; it is a made up offense called infringement. Even the courts recognize this: as the US Supreme Court wrote in Dowling vs United States,
interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: “[…] an infringer of the copyright.”
It is understandable that dishonest advocates of IP socialism want to muddy the waters and use loaded terms with negative connotations to describe what is simply peaceful behavior—learning, copying, emulating, competing—as stealing, but when even the courts concede that these offense are not actually theft or stealing but only a made-up tort of “infringement,” we free-market opponents of IP socialism should not use the socialists’ dishonest and inaccurate terminology.
Related
-
-
- Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off
- Lacalle on China and IP “Theft”
- More of the “China is Stealing Our IP” nonsense
- All-In Podcast Concern over China and IP “Theft”
- A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability, at n.31
- The Problem with Intellectual Property, Part III.A.3
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- Owning Ideas, Owning Bitcoin, Owning Fiat Dollars
- Another way to explain the problem with IP: Resources v. Knowledge; Ownership v. Possession
- Munger on Property Rights in Words and Information
- other posts and articles on the impossibility of “owning ideas“
Per Bylund • Mises Wire • 06/25/2026
W
hy would anyone invest large sums of capital into creating something new of uncertain income? This question captures the core of the argument for intellectual property, or the legal protection of inventors’ ideas from being copied and put to broader use. The simple logic appears intuitive and therefore persuasive, but does not stand up to scrutiny. Why? Because it applies to all entrepreneurship, which is always an investment in something of uncertain value. Yet this does not seem to stop entrepreneurs. Or, rather, it moderates which entrepreneurial projects are undertaken so that the craziest ideas are not pursued unless they are potentially very profitable. [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on June 21, 2026
Related
I’ve been squabbling in last few days with Craig Wright on Twitter. I append some below. Now he has some out with some babbling faux-econometric “proof” of optimal patent terms or something: Craig Wright, “The Price of Ideas,” Craig’s Substack (June 20, 2026). It’s just a big pretentious word salad. He doesn’t not seem to realize some of us are Austrians and reject this entire approach—the same way Rothbard and Hoppe reject the standard utilitarian model attempting to justify antitrust law. I specifically address, among many problems with standard defenses of IP, the utilitarian defense; this is just one of many problems with the case for IP. See, e.g., Kinsella, “The Problem with Intellectual Property,” Part III.B; Against Intellectual Property, “Utilitarian Defenses of IP”; Kinsella, “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” Part III.A, in LFFS. Wright does not deal with this at all. He just marches on as if there is nothing wrong methodologically or ethically with utilitarian arguments for law and rights. [continue reading…]
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