Faketoshi Craig Wright on “The Man Who Owns the Press” and “Reform, Not Abolition”

by Stephan Kinsella on November 6, 2026

Craig Wright—yes, the Craig Wright whom a UK court found in 2024 is not Satoshi Nakamoto—has followed up his “Price of Ideas” essay, which I responded to here, with two more long Substack attacks on IP abolitionism, and on me in particular.¹

Craig Wright, “The Man Who Owns the Press,” Craig’s Substack (June 20, 2026)
Idem, “Reform, Not Abolition: Scarcity, Control, and the Institutional Case for Intellectual Property,” Craig’s Substack (June 25, 2026)

1. “The Man Who Owns the Press”

Wright’s subtitle says it all: my anti-IP argument “quotes authorities instead of making one, mistakes physical rivalry for a complete theory of rights, and quietly hands the market to whoever already controls the machinery of reproduction.” He claims I borrow my central premise—that only scarce, rivalrous resources can be owned—from Hoppe and Rothbard instead of defending it; that Rothbard himself held that “copyright is a logical attribute of property right on the free market”; that IP protects not “ideas” or “value” but bounded legal objects like expression and claimed inventions; and that without IP, “The man with the press wins; the author is told, generously, that he still has his file.”

Crediting Hoppe and Rothbard for insights I have spent twenty-five years developing is not “borrowing” a premise; it’s called scholarship, and the argument is laid out in full in “The Problem with Intellectual Property” and elsewhere. Rothbard was indeed wrong about copyright, and Wright himself concedes the flaw: Rothbard’s contractual theory cannot bind third parties, as I explain in “IP as Contract.” Nor does “expression, not ideas” help him: however the protected object is described, patents and copyrights operate as nonconsensual negative easements over other people’s physical property (see “IP is Not ‘Not Property’”). And “the man with the press wins” is just a complaint about competition from someone using his own press—which today is in everyone’s pocket.

2. “Reform, Not Abolition”

Here Wright argues that the rivalry premise proves too much, since it would also undermine trade secrets, goodwill, and spectrum rights; that “the economically relevant scarcity was never in the finished idea” but in recovering the cost of producing it; that, per Fritz Machlup, it would be “irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it”; and that “Abolishing intellectual property does not abolish control,” since control would migrate into trade secrets, contracts, and technical locks. His prescription: reform—a higher obviousness bar, rolled-back copyright terms, robust fair use, narrower anti-circumvention rules, and so on.

But a reductio works only if I reject the conclusion. Trade secrets are legitimate when they rest on actual contracts or on the owner simply keeping quiet; to the extent trade secret law binds strangers, it is IP too. That control “migrates” into secrecy and contract is not a bug—people keeping secrets and making contracts is called liberty—and the teeth of “technical locks” come from the state, via the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rule, which even Wright wants narrowed. As for Machlup, Wright quotes only half of him: Machlup also said that if we did not already have a patent system, it would be irresponsible “to recommend instituting one” (see “The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright”). That is status-quo bias, not an argument, and “reform” is what IP critics settle for when, as I tweeted last December, they “simply cannot advocate a principled, radical solution: abolition.”

3. On X

Wright and I also went a few rounds on X around the same time:

Wright: “This is the problem with Stephen Kinsella: he disproves nothing, then struts away as if noise were logic.” (June 19, 2026)
Me: “Sigh. No. My argument is not that IP is ‘not property’.” (June 19, 2026)
Me, on his dodge about whether IP terms should be finite or perpetual (June 21, 2026)
Wright, replying that this is “a dressed-up false dilemma” (June 21, 2026) and “a false dilemma in a cheap suit” (June 21, 2026)

Strip away the length and the citations, and Wright’s “institutional case” is the same old utilitarian case for IP—and “reform” just means haggling over the length of the leash.