IP Queries from Jim Cox: On the IP Controversy

by Stephan Kinsella on October 1, 2025

In July 2010 I received the attached Word file via a service I used to use, YouSendIt. I just came across it in a search on my computer. I was unable to find the author at the time. I have confirmed it was Jim Cox, author of The Concise Guide To Economics. I never responded since I didn’t know who to respond to.

I post it here with no comment for now—I’ve responded to all this many times over the years (see links above for example). As for the idea that I need to guarantee everyone can find a way to monetize their hobbies, … your failed business model is not my problem.

On the IP Controversy

For those of us yet uncertain of the appropriate stand on Intellectual Property, I have a number of questions which might help in the process. Hopefully, you’ll see this as an opportunity to win over doubting Thomases such as myself as surely many of us have had questions such as the following. Since it took you and Jeffrey Tucker years to reach your current conclusions you’ll understand the need to help others along.

Upfront let me state that I have read your book, Against Intellectual Property as well as the longer volume by Boldrin and Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly. Neither fully addressed my concerns (or possibly I just didn’t manage to take it all in considering such new ideas). So in a spirit of open inquiry and honest curiosity in considering the views you have on Intellectual Property, please answer the following questions or points for our benefit so that we can possibly trade error for truth regarding IP:

Walk us through what would have taken place as Ayn Rand finished writing Atlas Shrugged or Tom Woods writing Nullification. The author contacts a publisher with a finished manuscript of a book that is widely anticipated and thus has a broad market of eager buyers. Could the publisher take the manuscript and publish it without any compensation to the author since they could just make a copy and return the original to the author? Or would the publisher pay a lesser royalty going in, as the author makes it a condition that they will only share the manuscript—yet to be read by the publisher—for some, again lower payment, than what they receive under IP? Or do you see the process as the author or his/her representative showing the publisher a page at a time while never letting the document out of their sight? Please elaborate on all of this.
You repeatedly state that ideas are not scarce in the sense that they are infinitely reproducible. But of course ideas are scarce in the sense that someone has to generate them and that takes massive effort. As a minor author among the universe of authors myself I know how difficult it is to actually complete a book or article—thinking of ideas to write about is easy; it’s the execution that is the hard part! Otherwise, where is Ron Paul’s next book, Tom Woods’ next book, your next book?—they have yet to be written because there is scarcity that has to be overcome. Surely, the prospect of royalties based on copyrights spurs more writers than the absence of such.
With no copyright protection couldn’t a George Soros fund a publication of Mises’s Human Action (and other such books) changing passages such that Mises advocated fractional reserve banking, fiat money, and the theory that underconsumption caused the business cycle and even stamping Mises Institute as the publisher on the title page and book spine (as you say, it’s their ink, their paper) knowing that this version would be the one statist universities, statist bookstore chains, and statist city libraries would stock all in order to confuse anyone with an interest in Mises?
Could a publisher produce a version of any book with any chosen person listed as the author (rather than the one who actually wrote it)? If you say this would be fraudulent and therefore actionable through the courts couldn’t said publisher put in a disclaimer in small print in a long, boring introduction or afterward stating such to cover themselves on this?
You cite the example of one button purchasing as an example of the abuse of copyright, and I agree it is an absurd use of copyright, but isn’t this similar to someone disputing land property rights by pointing out ridiculous examples such as the Kelso Case, zoning, rent controls, wet land exaggerations, etc as a way of showing the absurdity of these valid rights?
An argument for ending copyright (and patents) you use is that firms end up spending more resources protecting their copyrights (and patents) thereby losing profits from other pursuits and so ending copyrights (and patents) would actually result in more progress, production, and innovation. This seems a strange argument for a champion of free enterprise to make—firms are being so short sighted as to pass up profits and need rescuing from themselves? Doesn’t the entrepreneur’s profit and loss test generate firms that can see their own way through all of this?
Currently, we have IP and thriving book publishing (US 2005: 206,000 books) and movie production (US 2006: 599 released in theatres). These numbers don’t strike me as firms so consumed with protecting copyrights that they fail to innovate.
Without copyrights on movies would any producer fund a high quality, expensive movie such as Avatar ($230-$500 million) when they would know that as soon as it was released copies would proliferate with no costs of filming to recoup? Wouldn’t the end of copyright condemn movie audiences to rather cheap/low quality productions?
One of the points against IP is that most authors’/artists’/etc problem is not protecting their works from copiers but obscurity which would be cured by copiers. Doesn’t this miss the mark? An author/artist/etc is always free to allow copies to be made of their work; copyright protects against un-authorized use! By analogy, I could complain that my problem with my land property right based business is that not enough people are availing themselves with a visit to me and so I make effort to encourage more drop-ins. This does not mean I want them coming behind the counter to interfere in work or raiding the cash register—again it is un-authorized, not use entirely, that IP appropriately protects!
Isn’t this view of IP just the view of people who have not had a successful book and see no prospect of ever earning royalties from sales? Are there any successful authors who embrace your view of IP? Does Ron Paul? Does Tom Woods?