Enski, Patent Dystopia, How the Patent System Strangled Innovation, Job Creation and the Economy

by Stephan Kinsella on December 27, 2024

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”

This is my first book, a passion project that I self-published without any advertising. If you find it enjoyable, I would greatly appreciate any recommendations to others in your network. Conversely, if it doesn’t resonate with you, I would be grateful for your feedback so I can improve it for future editions!

I’d love to chat about the content if you’re interested, but I completely understand how busy you might be, so no reply is expected.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you find the book interesting!

All the best,
Ernest Enki
https://x.com/ErnestEnki

My reply:

Do you not have a free PDF posted online so people can read it? Why would you paywall the book, to make it harder to spread your ideas? You know you won’t make any money on this book, in any case sales will not be materially affected by posting a free PDF online—might even help. I don’t get why people would put so much time and effort into a book designed to spread some message and then intentionally hobble it behind a paywall.

And it’s ironic you try to use copyright law to restrict what people can do with your content—”The only condition is to include attribution that contains at least the book title and author’s name.” So you are against patents but not copyright? Do you have a coherent theory of property rights and justice from which to criticize the patent system? Do you have any articles online summarizing your case against patents?

No response, but I was not expecting one. I haven’t made time to read it yet, but he does seem to arrive at the right conclusions more or less, somehow. He seems to realize that the patent system impedes innovation and should be abolished. I doubt he has a coherent, property-based rationale for it, but we shall see, when I find time to look at it more closely.

But no, he does not “quote and cite” my Against Intellectual Property. I htink he’s confused about citations, references, things like this. What he does is list it in the Bibliography, which is improper since the book is nowhere cited or quoted in the text, which is what a bibliography is for. I think he means to have a list of recommended texts, or “things I read but didn’t bother to cite or quote.”

He is a nym, as his his Github page makes clear: “Ernest Enki is a pen name to safeguard my privacy and to allow the books and content to be judged solely on its content, independent of the author’s background or unorthodox Education.” Clearly he is an amateur scholar unfamiliar norms of such writing. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, and he does seem to have somehow stumbled across some kind of argument against patents. But as noted, I doubt it’s systematic or rooted in any principled understanding of justice or property rights, which suspicion is bolstered by his attempt to use copyright law to restrict the ability to copy his book combined with his using a paywall to prevent people from easily accessing his thoughts.

In the “About the Author and Book” section, he claims he has a companion book forthcoming:

Originally, both root problems— lack of jobs and inadequate Education — were covered in a single book, given their interconnectedness. However, the sheer size of the combined book and the resulting delay in its launch prompted the decision to split it into two separate volumes.

These two books are intended to complement each other, a yin and yang dynamic: the current book focuses on destruction – of the patent system – while the next book will focus on creation – of an alternative system of incentives for Education. This book is about maximizing the amount and quality of opportunities for workers, the next book is about how to best exploit those opportunities.

It is not clear what he is referring to by “inadequate Education” or why it is capitalized or what it has to do with … lack of jobs or what even that has to do with the patent system. In any case, more voices opposing the IP system are to be welcomed if they come from unorthodox quarters.

A few random thoughts from skimming. The book is somewhat ad hoc and has lots of extraneous thoughts sprinkled in. It does not seem systematic. Yet he does bring up lots of points I have brought up, leading me to think he has been influenced by much of my work (such as his argument in “Patent Problem #22: Creation, Property, and Monopoly” as to why creation is not a source of ownership, which I have argued before).¹

It is also not clear whether he opposes copyright. He does seem to favor forms of IP. In the section “Intellectual Property” he seems to think trade secrets, although similar in some ways to patents, are voluntary and thus beneficial. But as I have pointed out, trade secret law should also be abolished since it restricts the property rights of third parties who have not entered into any contract with the holder of the proprietary information.² And then he states that trademark law is also fine: “Unlike patents, a trademark does not prohibit others from competing with or using their property freely. … In summary, trademarks and trade secrets are not problematic for our objective of promoting task and job creation, innovation, and well-functioning economies.” This incorrect, as I have explained elsewhere. Trademark clearly violates property rights.³

As for copyright, as noted above, our author attempts to use copyright to prevent readers from using his text. He refers to the “false comparison” between copyright and patent. But it is not a false comparison. Both are illegitimate restrictions on property rights.⁴ Both do immense harm.⁵ But he seems to think copyright is downright innocuous compared to patents:

if patents were like copyrights, the patent system would be significantly weakened, offering innovators a much more lenient environment, to the point where innovators could almost forget that patents exist.

Totally false. Copyright now causes immense harm, and a patent system modeled after it would too.

While both copyrights and patents grapple with the issue that ideas lack precisely defined borders, copyrights do not generate the problems that we see with patent systems, because you can only copyright long strings of ideas, whereas patents are granted to the smallest individual component inventions.

Our author is confused about how bad copyright is. It lasts longer, it censors speech and freedom of the process, it threatens freedom on the internet, it distorts culture, and it applies to far more than just “strings of ideas”—it applies not just to literal copying, but also to “substantially similar” “copying” and to more abstractd things like look and feel, plots, characters, and, worse, to “derivative works,” which are not copies at all.

And this is why our author seems to have an ad hoc, scattered, unprincipled approach to patents, as it is not rooted in a clear understanding of property rights and related principles of justice, which would alert him to why other forms of IP are just as incompatible with capitalism, liberty, and property rights as is the patent system, albeit not as destructive.