In a previous article, I explored the absurdity of intellectual property, the unfair and inefficient monopoly privilege it confers on those experienced enough to navigate the legal system well. Because they are non-scarce and non-rival objects, like ideas or sound waves arranged in a specific order, they cannot be property economically speaking. No one can “own” vibes or reasonably punish me for using your grandmother’s recipe for beef stew. (This is also why cultural appropriation is an absurd concept.) [continue reading…]
My article “Defamation Law and Reputation Rights as a Type of Intellectual Property” was originally slated to appear in Elvira Nica & Gheorghe H. Popescu, eds., A Passion for Justice: Essays in Honor of Walter Block (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, forthcoming) but has been withdrawn and will be published elsewhere in September 2024. A pre-print draft is available here (pdf).
Mike Masnick of TechDirt, generally pro-civil liberties and generally skeptical of copyright but not an abolitionist, just put up a podcast episode he appeared on discussing free speech versus copyright and the censorship copyright law causes. This was an episode of the podcast “Sidebar by Courthouse News” called Copyright Conundrum, and re-podcast on Techdirt by Masnick. The shownotes: [continue reading…]
Jesus. Another confused self-proclaimed advocate of liberty advocating statist censorship in the name of intellectual property,1 just like other so-called libertarians have advocated restricting free trade for the same reasons.2
“Unfortunately, a subset of libertarians—who advocate for anarchism in the physical world and in the digital domain of the internet—have created confusion about the protection of copyrighted works on the internet.
[footnote] Some of the more prominent libertarian critics of intellectual property, including Murray Rothbard, Jeffrey Tucker, Stephan Kinsella, and Wendy McElroy, are self-described anarchists or “anarcho-capitalists,” which is a theory in libertarianism that markets can and should replace government in providing police, military, courts, and prisons, etc. See Libertarian Perspectives on Intellectual Property … (“Anarcho-capitalists oppose the existence of even a minimal state.”).”
First, you do not have to be an anarchist to oppose IP and the case against IP made by me, an anarchist and the most prominent anti-IP libertarian, does not depend on anarchist arguments. In fact, many Objectivists are now anti-IP.5 Second, Rothbard was not anti-IP. Third, we have not created confusion, we have tried to open people’s eyes to the rights-holocaust supported by IP fascists like Mossoff.
I guess we need to now add Heritage to the list of institutions that are horrible on IP, like Cato, the Federalist Society, Independent Institute, and others.6
I criticize this, e.g., in “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” Part. IV.I, in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023). [↩]
At Tom Woods’s wedding reception in June 2022, in Jacksonville, Florida, I ran into Mark Skousen and we ended up having a discussion about intellectual property, which we continued later in an email discussion. Gene Epstein was also included since Mark had also made some comments about IP in the aftermath of my Soho Forum debate with Richard Epstein in Nov. 2021 (which Gene Epstein hosts).
I thought my comments to Mark about IP might be of interest to some readers, to show how I sometimes respond to common queries about and arguments in favor of IP, so below I reprint a lightly edited and somewhat cleaned up version of our (casual, informal) interchange (reprinted with Mark and Gene’s permission, ‘natch). [continue reading…]
Duke economist Michael Munger had some comments about copyright and intellectual property (IP) and fraud, plagiarism, and related topics, in a recent AIER column, “Property in Words: Not Even Under Suspicion,” AIER (Jan. 14, 2024). He basically seems to be skeptical of the idea of copyright, based on his skepticism of words as property, but he never quite comes out and says so. In the end he comes out against dishonesty and plagiarism, but the analysis is somewhat all over the map and makes various misstatements about the nature of IP law and property rights.
In general, the IP topic and property rights in general is so rife with confusion that almost every analysis is always somewhat … off. In part, this is because people are confused due to Locke’s mistake of basing his property arguments on the labor theory of property,1 and in part because of confusion about how to separate or combine legal/normative/prescriptive and economic/factual/descriptive analysis. And any terms are used with somewhat different meanings, across domains of inquiry, that equivocation often creeps in. [continue reading…]
A friend asked me for my comments about a video with the clickbaity title “Harvard Economist Reveals Shocking SECRET About China In 2023“—in particular, regarding the third section, “Fierce Competition,” about how China handles IP vs. the U.S. My brief, dashed off response is below:
Well, the title of this video makes it look click-baity. I think he is confused. Here are my thoughts just from quickly watching the first few minutes of that section. [continue reading…]
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.
We provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation perspective.
To the extent possible under law,
Stephan Kinsella
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
C4SIF.
This work is published from:
United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.
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