Someone forwarded to me the email below from one Martin Gundinger of the Austrian Economics Center to one Britt Schier of the Friedrich A. v. Hayek Institute urging support of World IP Day. Both organizations are headquartered in Vienna; Barbara Kolm is Founding Director of the former and President of the latter, and is heralded as being “renowned for promoting free market policies.” (She is also co-founder of the Javier Milei Institut für Deregulierung in Europa (Javier Milei Institute for Deregulation in Europe), and also Vice-President of the Central Bank of Austria (Oesterreichische Nationalbank) from 2018 to 2023.
Institutes that are supposed to promote free market policies should not be promoting IP socialism! I guess we should not be surprised—Hayek was wobbly on IP1 and on libertarian and free market property rights principles in general.2
The letter is purportedly forwarded from the Austrian Economics Center to the Hayek Institute, but these groups are obviously closely connected (in fact, they share a Twitter profile!) and are going along with the ruse that they are independent and both in support of IP as cover for and excuse to help gin up support for the annual WIPO promotion of IP. To make it appear there is actually independent support from free market groups. To help foster the illusion, the lie, that IP is just another (and important!) form of property rights, a natural part of capitalism and free markets.3 In actuality, the letter was prepared by the dishonestly-named Property Rights Alliance, an IP lobbying shill outfit that never saw an IP law it didn’t like. Naturally, it favors socialist WIPO’s absurd and evil—and totally unlibertarian, anti-free market4 —World IP Day. See, e.g., its most recent International Property Rights Index 2025; Available Now! 2025 International Property Rights Index.
The purpose of many of these “freedom indexes” has been to shill for IP by including IP rights in the various empirical measures of economic freedom in various countries; see Economic Freedom of the World Rankings and Intellectual Property: The United States’ Bad Ranking is Even Worse Than Reported. For example, in the Property Rights Alliance‘s 2025 International Property Rights Index (see, on the downloads page, the Executive Summary (PDF) and Full Report (PDF)):
The index assesses the strength of institutions and the effectiveness of governments in safeguarding both physical and intellectual property rights. The IPRI is organized into three core components.
This is this disgusting group’s normal modus operandi: they send out a draft email ahead of WIPO’s annual World Intellectual Property Day:
In 2000, WIPO’s member states designated April 26 – the day on which the WIPO Convention came into force in 1970 – as World Intellectual Property Day with the aim of increasing the general understanding of intellectual property (IP).
World IP Day offers a unique opportunity to join with others around the world to consider how a balanced IP system helps the global arts scene to flourish and enables the technological innovation that drives human progress. The campaign highlights the role IP rights, such as patents, trademarks, industrial designs and copyright, play in encouraging and rewarding innovation and creativity while ensuring that researchers, inventors, businesses, designers, artists, and society benefit from it.
See, for example, the 2025 letter mentioned on their page for World Intellectual Property Day 2025. The current letter being circulated to drum up support for World IP Day and IP socialism is below. Shame on these allegedly free market institutes for supporting IP socialism—as well as others like the Independent Institute and others in the links below5 — even Hayek, as illiberal and confused and bad as he was, even he was at least somewhat hesitant about IP and would not have endorsed this evil World IP Day.6
Related resources:
- Kinsella, The Problem with Intellectual Property
- Don’t tell me to read Hayek
- ——, Classical Liberals, Libertarians, Anarchists and Others on Intellectual Property
- The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright
- The Patent Holocaust
- Economic Freedom of the World Rankings and Intellectual Property: The United States’ Bad Ranking is Even Worse Than Reported
- “IP as a Force for Good”: The Banality of Evil
- Pharmaceutical Shills and Think Tank Corruption: Sally Pipes’s The World’s Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy―and How to Keep It
- Independent Institute on the “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection
- Cato on IP
- James Stern: Is Intellectual Property Actually Property? [Federalist Society No. 86 LECTURE]
- More defenses of IP by the Federalist Society
- Adam Mossoff, “The Patent System: America’s Innovation Engine,” Heritage Foundation Report (Jan. 23, 2025); other pro-IP pieces at the Heritage Foundation from Mossoff and others here
- Acton Institute: Sabhlok and Rogan on Intellectual Property
- On Patents, Hoover Sucks
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
- Adi Kamdar, Daniel Nazer, Vera Ranieri, Defend Innovation: How to Fix Our Broken Patent System, Electronic Frontier Foundation (Feb. 2015)
- Mark Cuban Funds EFF’s New ‘Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents’
- Hoppe on Intellectual Property
- Hayek’s Views on Intellectual Property
- Tucker, “Misesian vs. Marxian vs. IP Views of Innovation“
- Tucker, “Hayek on Patents and Copyrights“
- Salerno, Hayek Contra Copyright Laws
DRAFT LETTER FROM AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS CENTER TO THE HAYEK INSTITUTE
Date: Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 8:06 AM
To: Britt Schier <britt.schier@hayek-institut.
Subject: Signature requested: 2026 World IP Day Coalition Letter
Dear FMRS Partners,
Please review the attached global coalition letter celebrating World IP Day and highlighting the importance of protecting intellectual property rights. To add your organization’s support to this initiative, please use the link provided in the attached document to sign the form by April 15th. Thank you!
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
- Hayek’s Views on Intellectual Property; Tucker, “Misesian vs. Marxian vs. IP Views of Innovation“; Tucker, “Hayek on Patents and Copyrights“; Salerno, Hayek Contra Copyright Laws. [↩]
- Hoppe on Hayek; Hoppe, “The Hayek Myth” (PFS 2012); Hoppe, F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique, in The Great Fiction); Hoppe, Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty; Hoppe, Why Mises (and not Hayek)?; Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom”. [↩]
- Classifying Patent and Copyright Law as “Property”: So What?; The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property; The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists; Objectivists: “All Property is Intellectual Property”; A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”; Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part IV.I. In particular, references in notes 75-76 et pass.; KOL229 | Ernie Hancock Show: IP Debate with Alan Korwin: “Korwin’s Defense and Departure (49:59–1:17:42) … Korwin doubles down, arguing that copyright is a natural right, more real than physical property because it’s a unique creation.”; Richard Epstein on “The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property” (Mises 2006). [↩]
- “Intellectual Property Advocates Hate Competition.” [↩]
- See Independent Institute on the “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection and others in resoures listed in the post. [↩]
- Hayek’s Views on Intellectual Property; Tucker, “Misesian vs. Marxian vs. IP Views of Innovation“; Tucker, “Hayek on Patents and Copyrights“; Salerno, Hayek Contra Copyright Laws. [↩]
