Zeidman, Why Libertarians Should Support a Strong Patent System

@NSKinsella

Last 30 min touches on IP and comments you have made. Citing he saw no argument a couple times https://t.co/cYVyJscWRi

— CHUCKun$ (@CHUCKunMONEY) January 31, 2026

This tweet rattled my cage. I listened to enough of it to see it’s just another pro-IP engineer repeating the standard bogus arguments. Ayn Rand Fan Club 99: Bob Zeidman on Forensics, IP, AI, Election Fraud & Poker

(I appeared previously on this podcast: KOL470 | Intellectual Property & Rights: Ayn Rand Fan Club 92 with Scott Schiff.) Zeidman tweeted a link to his older pro-article that he mentioned during the discussion: Bob Zeidman & Eashan Gupta, “Why Libertarians Should Support a Strong Patent System,” IPWatchdog.com (Jan. 5, 2016). That it was published on the site of IPWatchdog.com, the site run by patent shill and blowhard-buffoon Gene Quinn¹, does not augur well, but is not a surprise.

My tweeted response:

I didn’t hear any extensive discussion of argument for IP in their podcast, only (understandable) complaining about the effects of IP–such as the threat it poses to AI, hopes that it won’t damages AI too much, complaints about Youtube taking down videos because of copyright,…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) February 1, 2026

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I didn’t hear any extensive discussion of argument for IP in their podcast, only (understandable) complaining about the effects of IP–such as the threat it poses to AI, hopes that it won’t damages AI too much, complaints about Youtube taking down videos because of copyright, unjust copyright infringement lawsuits (e.g. against George Harrison)–all things caused by IP, not by abuses of IP, but by IP itself. It is somewhat rich for people who support IP complain about its predictable effects. You would think they would stop and question whether IP makes sense, after complaining about it for half a podcast. You know, stop and think about things, in principled terms? As I wrote to my fellow IP lawyers back at the beginning of my career, in “Is Intellectual Property Legitimate?”, an article for the Pennsylvania Bar Association Intellectual Property Newsletter (Winter 1998) https://c4sif.org/2022/09/is-intellectual-property-legitimate-1998/,

“It is not surprising that IP attorneys seem to take for granted the legitimacy of IP; after all, it pays the bills. This acknowledged self-interest does not necessarily mean that we are wrong to support IP; but it does give us cause to be skeptical of the seductive appeal of what may be makeweight rationalizations. As members of our community and as participants in the governmental and legal machinery, it behooves us to recognize our own built-in bias and, on occasion, to question and reflect on the widely-held justifications that we hear ourselves sometimes repeating by rote.”

But this is now how engineers or those who think they benefit from patents think. As Upton Sinclair quipped, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It I have been able to do it. I guess, for some of us, having integrity and principle and living the examined life is worth something.

As for his article–I previously blogged about a post by Techdirt commenting on a debate Zeidman participated in trying to defend patents. I’ve read his article. It is one of these articles that is a good illustration of Brandolini’s law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law. The first couple paragraphs alone would take more time to debunk than they occupy. E.g.: “some argue that the patent system is outdated and no longer encourages innovation”–yes, and some argue that it never did and is not outdated at all, but has always been a problem. And the risible assertion that the patent system “operates according to libertarian values” (without saying what those are. Hint: it’s justice and property rights, not protecting people from competition) and that attempts to limit patent rights “introduce government regulation and limits competition”. ! Patents are government regulations the express point of which is to restrict competition so that  “innovators” can “recoup their costs” by … charging a monopoly price! Helloooo. https://c4sif.org/2011/07/intellectual-property-advocates-hate-competition/ To refer to the state making it slightly harder to obtain or assert the destructive monopoly privileges grants that the state itself grants as “”introduce government regulation and limits competition” takes some chutzpah.

The next paragraph starts off with more propaganda: “Patents are simply property rights for inventors that are issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.” They are not natural rights, not property rights; patents violate property rights. They are grants of monopoly privilege that impede and distort innovation and protect grantees from competition. And they are not and never were thought of by the founders and framers as natural rights or property rights. https://c4sif.org/2010/09/locke-on-ip-mises-rothbard-and-rand-on-creation-production-and-rearranging/

https://c4sif.org/2011/06/intellectual-property-rights-as-negative-servitudes/ https://c4sif.org/2025/05/libertarian-lockean-creationism/

that is just the first paragraph.

BTW he writes: “Patents issued in the United States are only enforceable in the United States, U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions.” Tell that to crank patent troll Gil Hyatt, who wants to get Trump to help him unlock his old pre-AIA submarine patents to give Trump another way to block imports from Chinese factories using processes covered in Hyatt’s US patents…, under 35 U.S.C. § 271(g)  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/271  https://c4sif.org/2026/01/patent-troll-hyatt-trump-tariff/

“Patents offer protection for inventors from competitors.” Correct. This is not a property right.

“Without patents, inventors have no incentive to disclose how they created their inventions.” The purpose of law is not to give inventors incentives to disclose information but to secure justice by protecting property rights. And this statement is false anyway; for most inventions, disclosure is inevitable; and for others, the inventor often keeps it as a trade secret instead of patenting it. As Judge Easterbrook writes,

“The idea that a patent represents an exchange of protection for disclosure makes no sense, except perhaps with respect to process patents. The product itself, not the patent papers, usually discloses things. Inventors want and need patents only when disclosure is inevitable in the absence of protection.” Frank H. Easterbrook, “Intellectual Property Is Still Property,” Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 13, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 108–118, pp. 109–110. https://c4sif.org/2011/07/mark-lemley-the-very-basis-of-our-patent-system-is-a-myth/

https://c4sif.org/2010/12/the-purpose-of-patent-law/

Other false and groundless assertions abound. “Patents encourage innovation not discourage it.” First, the purpose of law is not to encourage innovation but to protect property rights; to do justice. Second, patents do not encourage innovation and there is no evidence to support this contention, and it defies all reason and experience. The proponents of patents have had over 200 years to come up with evidence to back up their hunch that patents might be a good idea; and they have not, and cannot. In an exhaustive 1958 study prepared for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee On Patents, Trademarks & Copyrights, economist Fritz Machlup concluded:

“No economist, on the basis of present knowledge, could possibly state with certainty that the patent system, as it now operates, confers a net benefit or a net loss upon society. The best he can do is to state assumptions and make guesses about the extent to which reality corresponds to these assumptions. … If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one.”  https://c4sif.org/2012/10/the-overwhelming-empirical-case-against-patent-and-copyright/

“Since 1790, the United States has greatly benefited from its patent system, which resulted in the United States becoming the most innovative country in the world.”

This baseless assertion is ironic, given what Zeidman said in the referenced podcast: [1:17:44]

“people just love to say look at this thing that’s strange, therefore … look we did that with climate change. The people who said look there was there were three hurricanes this year and last year there was only one therefore climate must be changing—no, you you need to look into the basic cause. … so these anomalies that people find are reasons to look further, but you can’t make a conclusion directly from them. But unfortunately .. to put [it] in the context of Candace Owens, I mean she she creates these connections. I mean she’ll find a connection between two things, very tenuous, and then draw a conclusion from it and she says [yeah I’m only asking questions’, but her listeners all know it’s a conclusion andto them they want to believe it so badly. They say, “Look, Candace Owens, who’s smart and I respect her, she found the connection.” No, she found some correlation, and correlation is not causation.”

“Is Intellectual Property Property?“
Of course this is not the question, as I have already explained. https://c4sif.org/2025/04/ip-is-not-not-property/

It’s whether IP laws re just, and compatible with property rights and justice. They are not. They violate property rights. They are unjust. https://c4sif.org/2011/06/intellectual-property-rights-as-negative-servitudes/ They impoverish mankind and kill millions. https://c4sif.org/2025/10/the-patent-holocaust/

I can’t go on. Brandolini’s law wins again.

Not sure why you want me to discuss with this guy. I obviously have nothing to learn from him and he does not care about truth or justice. He just wants to come up with makeweight arguments to justify his use of patents. It’s all tendentious, non-serious, more of the same stuff I’ve heard many times.

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Update: I found the part where he mentions my previous appearance, KOL470 | Intellectual Property & Rights: Ayn Rand Fan Club 92 with Scott Schiff (not by name), at 1:12:11 or so:

He says he’s a friend of Mossoff; no surprise. He says he didn’t hear me explain why Rand was wrong. Uh, I did. Very clearly, in that episode, and all over my writing. See The Problem with Intellectual Property, and many others here. On Rand herself, numerous criticisms: at both c4sif.org and stephankinsella.com.

Zeidman says he knows B. Zorina Khan who has written the best book on the topic (I think he means Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy (Oxford Univ. Press, 2022), or perhaps The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790–1920 [Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009]).² I intend to write later in more detail about this but from what I have seen, Khan’s studies do not provide empirical evidence that there are innovation benefits of the patent system at all, nor that any such alleged net innovation gains outweigh the immense costs of the system, which is what you would have to prove to show that the system is worth it.³

But let’s take Zeidman’s comments here (failing to mention my name–this type of behavior is a typical Objectivist ploy—they don’t want to sanction the evil or whatever; this seems to be how Mossoff operates, but to be fair Zeidman does not seem like that type):

I think I think it’s the best book on the topic about how societies that had strong intellectual property protection advanced.

And I think in my mind the idea of libertarianism is that you want to advance society.

You want people to be more more productive. And it’s, you know, whether that’s through physical property or intellectual property or whatever you do, you want people to be more productive.

1.  Desperate Patent Troll’s Plan to get Trump to Unblock his old patent applications to replace tariff games. [↩]
2. Mossoff’s Recommended Criticisms of Intellectual Property. [↩]
3. Kinsella, “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Patent,” Mises Daily (Mar. 7, 2005).  [↩]
4. Another way to explain the problem with IP: Resources v. Knowledge; Ownership v. Possession; Libertarian and Lockean Creationism: Creation As a Source of Wealth, not Property Rights; Hayek’s “Fund of Experience”; the Distinction Between Scarce Means and Knowledge as Guides to Action. [↩]
5. The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property. [↩]