The query below, about someone being “called a communist by my boss for expressing my opinion against there being IP at all” reminds me of an encounter I had yesterday. I was leaving Southland Hardware store. My car was parked outside, with my MISES license plate with the Don’t Tread On Me motto and rattlesnake. Two guys were talking outside. One said “Is that your car?” I said yeah. He said “I took a picture of your license plate, hope you don’t mind… say, are you who I think you are?” I said “Probably.” So then he tells me he has read my work and knows an IP lawyer and showed him my anti-IP arguments and the IP lawyer went ballistic and basically said I was the devil. Haha. Good to know.
BTW this is another example of the various ways people find out about new ideas: libertarianism, IP, bitcoin, Austrian econ. You never know which one will lead to the others.
Query:
Subject: Layman questions on IP
… I’m writing you from [South American country] because I’ve recently become very interested in IP and after some research I came across some of your works as well as a few debates. I’ve been talking to people about this issue for some time now and I’m pretty surprised to see how deep rooted everyone’s defense of IP appears to be. Most recently I’ve been called a communist by my boss for expressing my opinion against there being IP at all. I’m reaching out to you because I’m working on a writing that introduces this topic for laypeople like me, and I wanted your take on a few things.
I should clarify I’m not formally trained in any type of law nor in economics. I’m just a guy who really enjoys reading and listening to Sowell and Friedman, and who, after doing enough of the Chicago gateway drug, got more and more into the Austrian stuff and what have you. I must say I’ve always been a skeptical person, if not cynical, but this has been an extremely sobering yet enjoyable experience. I knew some realities are sold to us upside down, but I didn’t know how many of them or how badly so.
The main question that motivates my reaching out is this:
If we know concentrated interest pretty much always prevails politically over diffused interest, and IP represents nothing but concentrated interests (hell, it even represents a mechanism to concentrate interest), what is the best strategy to advocate for an IP-less world? Is it by arousing or appealing to a dormant or potential concentrated interest that could emerge from change? Like a certain type of socially available but currently unexploitable talent.
People defend IP because of its “democratic promise”: everyone can get their own monopoly, yay! But even pointing out the absurdity of this might be too weak. Asking if, or even proving that that’s not how the greater social good (however that’s defined) is achieved doesn’t seem to be enough. In fact, I don’t believe “the greater good” sells at all. Not because people are evil, but because due to socialist education and other factors most can’t understand what it actually means nor can they already visualize it in the lives they live today. Gratitude is at a premium, and that certainly doesn’t help.
Also, I must add, we’re at a time in which it seems technology will exponentially elevate the costs of enforcing IP to the point the debate about it might even become obsolete. Do you think it more pertinent to gear the communication towards that than to making a case against IP as it still exists today?
Anyway, I apologize if you find this to be a bit all over the place, I just wanted to get your thoughts on how to best aim the divulging of this subject for laypeople like me, seeing that you seem to have taken up the responsibility to do so from your place as an IP lawyer with great success. I have a firm grasp of the ideas, the logic behind it, and even some intuitions of the equivalences between what’s being granted and what’s being taken away in order to do so. It’s very complex and ultimately requires empirical testing. So the presenting of the subject is covered. I’m just missing some empirical studies, which I’m currently researching in variety, and a good direction to point the core argumentation towards. Seeing that you’re a successful lawyer, I thought you’d know a thing or two about that.
Thank you very much for your time
Kinsella:
Yes, IP benefits mostly Hollywood, the music industry, and Big Pharma, mostly in the US, so because of US IP imperialism the whole world is paying for these three welfare recipients. But they don’t see it so they tolerate it because everyone has accepted the mistake that I think stemmed from Locke:
I fear the main problem is the deeply rooted creationism/labor theory of property mistake of Locke permeates everyone’s thinking so much that it is impossible to dislodge this by simple education or empirical studies. They would have to rethink their entire view of justice and property rights which is not possible without sustained thought. I think we are stuck with IP until it becomes unenforceable.
On the first and second points, see below. If you would like to discuss in a zoom call, I can give you 30 min. Just let me know.
Lockean Creationism
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory,” Kinsella on Liberty Podcast (Mar. 28, 2013) (transcript at C4SIF Blog (Apr. 13, 2013)) (the main statement: Locke’s labor-mixing metaphor confused property theory and fed both the labor theory of value and IP; property should rest instead on first appropriation of scarce resources and contract)
- Stephan Kinsella, “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,” C4SIF Blog (May 6, 2025) (creation is a source of wealth, not of property rights, which come only from homesteading and contract; knowledge guides action but is not scarce; collects his earlier posts on Locke and creationism)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property,” StephanKinsella.com (June 23, 2010) (traces Locke’s labor theory of property to the labor theory of value of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, and argues both feed IP: if you own your labor, you seem to own whatever you “create”)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’,” Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 29, 2010) (Locke himself did not treat IP as a natural right; production only rearranges scarce resources, so creation is not an independent source of ownership)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Creation and Labor as Sources of Property Rights and the Danger of Metaphors,” The Libertarian Standard (Dec. 8, 2011) (“Creation is a source of wealth. Not of ownership or property rights.” Also warns against treating labor as literally “embodied” in things)
- Stephan Kinsella, “The ‘Ontology’ Mistake of Libertarian Creationists,” C4SIF Blog (May 29, 2025) (creation “is neither necessary nor sufficient for ownership”)
- Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023), ch. 14, “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” Part III.B (“Libertarian Creationism”), and ch. 15, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” Parts IV.C (“Lockean Creationism”) and IV.D (“The Labor Metaphor”) (the book treatment: creation is a source of wealth, not property rights, a confusion “common among libertarians, especially Randians”)
- “Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic ‘Labor’ Metaphor” (2011)
- “The Intellectual Property Quagmire, or, The Perils of Libertarian Creationism”
- “The Problem with Intellectual Property” (2025, now a chapter in the Springer business-ethics handbook). It calls Lockean creationism the main moral argument for IP, but it presents it as one argument among several rather than the root cause.
Circumventing IP
- Stephan Kinsella, “If Congress Can Ban Home Distilling to Stop Tax Evasion, It Can Ban Technology That Makes Patent and Copyright Infringement Easy,” Property and Freedom Society (Oct. 26, 2026) (also at C4SIF Blog) (the main roundup: encryption, torrenting, and the internet have made consumer-level copyright “almost a dead letter”; the same hope applies to patents as 3D printing matures; and the government’s case for the home-distilling ban could justify banning 3D printers, AI decompilers, and other tools that make infringement easy)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL502 | Abolish Intellectual Property? Stephan Kinsella on Objectively Speaking: Scarcity, Negative Servitudes, IP, Objectivism, AI Copyright, and Bitcoin Ownership,” StephanKinsella.com (Oct. 13, 2026) (the internet has largely undermined copyright since the mid-1990s; 3D printing, perhaps with AI-guided fabrication, could someday make patents unenforceable)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Every app on Earth is now open source… whether it likes it or not,” C4SIF Blog (Oct. 12, 2026) (AI-assisted decompilation and cloning are making proprietary software transparent and replicable: “Die, copyright, die!”)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Phillips: Has AI Already Ended Intellectual Property?” C4SIF Blog (Feb. 12, 2026) (not yet: encryption and torrenting have already weakened copyright enforcement and 3D printing may eventually do the same for patents, but the bigger near-term danger is IP law hobbling AI; collects earlier 3D-printing posts)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL458 | Patent and Copyright versus Innovation, Competition, and Property Rights (APEE Guatemala 2025),” StephanKinsella.com (Apr. 8, 2025) (Q&A: “copyright is getting easier and easier to evade because the nature of it is that you just copy a file”; hope that 3D printing “will eventually mature” enough to do the same to patents)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL450 | Together Strong IP Discussion (Matthew Sands of Nations of Sanity feat Econ Bro),” StephanKinsella.com (Nov. 27, 2024) (piracy, torrenting, blockchain, and decentralized platforms are making IP increasingly unenforceable)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” C4SIF Blog (May 12, 2022) (“Piracy of copyrighted works is already rampant due to the Internet and encryption. As 3D printing technology advances, we may see an increased ability of consumers to evade patent law as well.”)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Gary North on the 3D Printing Threat to Patent Law,” C4SIF Blog (Jan. 31, 2022) (North on 3D printers versus patents, alongside his “Goodbye, Copyright”; updated with later posts on AI and copyright)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL346 | Copyright and Satoshi’s Legacy: The Tatiana Show, with Tatiana Moroz,” StephanKinsella.com (July 1, 2021) (copyright “on a consumer level is almost a dead letter”; the hope is that patent law will suffer the same fate as 3D printing matures)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Patents Kill Update: Volunteers 3D-Print Unobtainable $11,000 Valve For $1 To Keep Covid-19 Patients Alive; Original Manufacturer Threatens To Sue,” C4SIF Blog (Mar. 18, 2020) (a real-world case of 3D printing getting around a patent-protected monopoly)
- Stephan Kinsella, “IP in a World Without Scarcity,” C4SIF Blog (June 16, 2016) (posting Mark Lemley’s paper: the internet brought a flood of piracy copyright owners couldn’t stop, and 3D printing, synthetic biology, and robotics could do the same for physical goods)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Pharmaceutical ‘Printers’ and Patents,” C4SIF Blog (Aug. 24, 2011) (if 3D printers let people make generic drugs from recipes online, the state would have to suppress the knowledge itself to protect pharma patents)
- Stephan Kinsella, “The IP War on 3D Printing Begins,” C4SIF Blog (June 28, 2011)
- Stephan Kinsella, “In future, copyright could be extinct,” StephanKinsella.com (Nov. 21, 2002) (pointing to Fred Reed’s Washington Times column)
Hollywood, Music, Big Pharma and US IP Imperialism
- IP Imperialism tag page
- Stephan Kinsella, “Decouple Trade and IP Protection,” Brownstone Institute (Dec. 4, 2024) (also at C4SIF Blog) (the US pressures developing nations to adopt and strengthen IP laws “primarily for the benefit of US corporate interests, namely pharmaceuticals (patent) and Hollywood and music (copyright)”: “This is what I call IP imperialism.”)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL427 | Lewis & Clark College Debate on Intellectual Property Imperialism,” StephanKinsella.com (Apr. 11, 2024) (these laws “benefit a few major US/western industries”: Hollywood and the music industry through copyright, the pharmaceutical industry through patents and the FDA, at the expense of consumers and developing countries)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” C4SIF Blog (May 12, 2022), reprinted in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023), ch. 15 (IP is pushed by “entrenched special interests, in particular Hollywood and the American music industry, which rely on copyright,” and “the pharmaceutical industry, which profits from the patent system,” while “the US bullied other countries to keep ratcheting up their own IP laws and enforcement”)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL492 | Menger Institute Podcast #6: Property Rights, Patents, Anarchy, Patents, Anarchy, Technology, Long-Term Hope for Freedom and the Technological Death of the State,” StephanKinsella.com (June 13, 2026) (Hollywood, music, and pharma are “the three big industries in the US that are beneficiaries of American style patent and copyright,” with pharma “the big one”; it “does take advantage of the rest of the world”)
Libertarianism, Anarchy, IP, Austrian Economics, Bitcoin: One Leads to the Other
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL484 | Praxeology, Property Rights & Bitcoin: Bitcoin Infinity Show #192, with Knut Svanholm,” StephanKinsella.com (Mar. 2, 2026) (host Knut Svanholm on the new pattern: people “get interested in Bitcoin, then they get interested in economics and then they become libertarians and Austrians,” the reverse of the older path)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL492 | Menger Institute Podcast #6: Property Rights, Patents, Anarchy, Patents, Anarchy, Technology, Long-Term Hope for Freedom and the Technological Death of the State,” StephanKinsella.com (June 13, 2026) (from The Fountainhead to libertarianism, then the Austrians, then anarchism; after Ron Paul and the internet, the movement grew “maybe five times as much as it used to be, maybe 10 times” and went international)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL401 | Sazmining Twitter Space: Bitcoin & Property Rights,” StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 16, 2023) (if Bitcoin works, “the only way to understand it is I think the Austrian, the Austrian and free market” view, so even socialist Bitcoiners are “gonna face the choice at a certain point”)
- Stephan Kinsella, “Kudos,” StephanKinsella.com (June 25, 2009, updated regularly) (reader mail, including one reader who says Against Intellectual Property “turned me into a libertarian”)
- Stephan Kinsella, “How I Became a Libertarian,” LewRockwell.com (Dec. 18, 2002), reprinted as “Being a Libertarian,” in Walter Block, comp., I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2010), ch. 37, and revised as ch. 1 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023) (from Rand to libertarianism to “not only an anarcho-libertarian, but a Misesian-Austrian”)
- Stephan Kinsella, “KOL298 | We Are Libertarians 457: Path to Libertarianism,” StephanKinsella.com (Sept. 13, 2020) (with Chris Spangle on the path from Objectivism to anarcho-capitalism, plus IP and Austrian economics)
