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)
@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):
Yes, there are lots of good resources of varying forms (articles, books, videos) for those supporting property rights, rule of law and free markets. An essay summarizing economic & historical research that economic growth correlates w property rights in inventions (patents): Stephen Haber, “Patents and the Wealth of Nations,” George Mason Law Review, vol. 23 (2016)
Two excellent monographs by award-winning economist B. Zorina Khan with extensive historical and economic research that belies the claim in the tweet to which you’re replying:
Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy (Oxford Univ. Press, 2022)
The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790–1920 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009)
More excellent monographs by legal scholars and an economist:
Jonathan M. Barnett, Innovators, Firms, and Markets: The Organizational Logic of Intellectual Property (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021)
Robert P. Merges, American Patent Law: A Business and Economic History (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2023)
Daniel Spulber, The Case for Patents (World Scientific Publ., 2021)
If someone is interested in watching talks on this topic, I discuss some of the research in the above works, as well as my own research, in recorded talks here:
The Role of Intellectual Property in an Innovation Economy (Hayek Lecture Series, Duke University, 2017)
Great Innovators and Great Capitalists (ARI OCON 2021) (unfortunately, there’s no video that shows my PowerPoint slides)
Ironically, because of the copyright system Mossoff supports, many of these works are paywalled and not accessible.
In any case, yes, I have collected such materials. See:
- Stephan Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023; www.stephankinsella.com/ip-reader)
- Stephan Kinsella, You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023; www.stephankinsella.com/own-ideas)
- ——, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part IV
- ——, A Selection of my Best Articles and Speeches on IP
- ——, “Legal Scholars: Thumbs Down on Patent and Copyright”
- ——, “The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright”
- C4SIF Resources page
IP is completely unjust and incompatible with libertarianism, innovation, freedom, property rights, capitalism; copyright and patent law are legislative abominations that ought to be immediately abolished. Patent law impedes and distorts innovation and thus impoverishes the world; copyright law censors freedom of the press and speech, distorts culture, and threatens Internet freedom. Most Objectivists are unable to see this because of their confused “values” based theory of rights, caused by the Lockean confusion on labor and “creationism,”1, which is too bad,2 but there is no doubt that the pro-IP Objectivists are on the wrong side of justice and and history.
- Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory; Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors; Labor, Value, Metaphors, Locke, Intellectual Property; “The Intellectual Property Quagmire, or, The Perils of Libertarian Creationism“; Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’; Succinct Criticism of Utilitarianism and Libertarian Creationism, Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property. [↩]
- But see “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism,” Yet another Randian recants on IP, An Objectivist Recants on IP. [↩]
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