Colorado IP Socialists Trying to Amend LPCO Platform to Include IP

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:

2.1 Aggression, Property and Contract

Aggression is the use, trespass against, or invasion of the borders of another person’s owned resource (property) without the owner’s consent; or the threat thereof. We oppose all acts of aggression as illegitimate and unjust, whether committed by private actors or the state.

Each person is the presumptive owner of his or her own body (self-ownership), which right may be forfeited only as a consequence of committing an act of aggression. Property rights in external, scarce resources are determined in accordance with the principles of original appropriation or homesteading (whereby a person becomes an owner of an unowned resource by first use and transformation), contract (whereby the owner consensually transfers ownership to another person), and rectification (whereby an owner’s property rights in certain resources are transferred to a victim of the owner’s tort, trespass, or aggression to compensate the victim).²

This leaves no room for property rights in ideas or nonscarce goods, and in fact all IP laws and IP rights necessarily violate libertarian property rights.³

It is monstrous for any libertarian to support this utterly evil system.⁴

The Colorado LP also heroically revised its platform in 2021, as noted in Amend the LP Platform to Abolish IP!

But now some confused “libertarians” in LPCO are trying to undo this. They are possibly affiliated with the Mises Caucus (?), since I understand LPCO is dominated by MC members—if so, this is shameful and shows their ignorance of Austro-libertarian principles.

Here is the proposed change (text to be deleted; text to be added):

Intellectual Monopolies
As We oppose all government intervention in the marketplace, we favor the repeal of intellectual property laws. Disputes between inventors, creators, authors, artists, businesses, and other such entities should be resolved without government intervention. and recognize that published ideas, works of literature, art, inventions or other intellectual works of labor are the property of that creator and government has no jurisdiction in protection, defense or prosecution therein.⁵

The new language does not call for state-enforced IP but it is just as bad since it recognizes ideas or “intellectual works of labor” as property.⁶

It is wrong to say there ought to be (or can be) property right in ideas, knowledge, or patterns of information, or that any legal rights that try to do this are just. They are not. They violate property rights. IP rights are socialist.

The “works of labor” language here is the language of confused libertarian creationists and those who base their ideas on the labor theory of property, much like Marxism is based on the related labor theory of value.⁷

Stop this abomination before it happens, Colorado Libertarians and Mises Caucus members!

From my post: "Colorado IP Socialists Trying to Amend LPCO Platform to Include IP"

"… The Colorado LP also heroically revised its platform in 2021, as noted in Amend the LP Platform to Abolish IP!

… But now some confused “libertarians” in LPCO are trying to undo this. They…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) June 3, 2025

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). [↩]
2. Aggression and Property Rights Plank in the Libertarian Party Platform. [↩]
3. See, on this, Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes.  [↩]
4. “Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?” [↩]
5.  See Bylaws and Platform Proposals, by James Wiley (06/02/2025). [↩]
6. Which is confused; IP is about recognizing patterns of information as objects of property rights). See Intellectual Property versus Intellectual Property Rights. On “things” as objects of property rights, and the proper use of the term “property,” see LFFS, ch. 1, App. 1, the sections “Concept and Definition of ‘Property’” and “Things”; Libertarian Answer Man: Self-ownership for slaves and Crusoe; and Yiannopoulos on Accurate Analysis and the term “Property”; Mises distinguishing between juristic and economic categories of “ownership”. See also Penner on Intellectual Property, Monopolies, and Property.  [↩]
7. On libertarian creationism, see Libertarian and Lockean Creationism: Creation As a Source of Wealth, not Property Rights; Hayek’s “Fund of Experience”; on the unsupported assumption that anything that is created can be owned, that is, can be the object of property rights, and on why ideas cannot be owned, see … New Working Paper: Machan on IP;  The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property; A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”. [↩]