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Genuine Fakes, Knockoffs and Trademark

I was sightseeing earlier this week in Istanbul with my friends Greg Morin and Jay Baykal, a local. There were knockoff clothes and purses everywhere—in the Grand Bazaar, in the streets nearby, and so on. As I’ve pointed out before, trademark law is unjust.1 It prohibits the sale of goods even when the consumers are not defrauded or confused—everyone knows that they are buying imitations.

We were looking at some of the cheaper knockoffs and Jay told me that the really good ones are more expensive and are so good you can’t even tell—these are called “genuine fakes.” Great expression. Down with IP. [continue reading…]

  1. Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property,” in A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, edited by Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024). []
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The state regulates pharmaceuticals by laws and regulations that require prescriptions, FDA approvals, and so on. It distorts the market by regulating healthcare—inflating the price of insurance by prohibiting insurers taking into account pre-existing conditions, by tax rules that remove consumer choice from the payment, and so on. It inflates the prices of pharmaceuticals by granting patents and by imposing the huge regulatory burdens and cost of the FDA process, and by increasing demand for such pharmaceuticals from Medicare and Medicaid purchases. And then it tries to “negotiate” for lower prices, which causes much squawking.

Update: See the upcoming Federalist Society event, Medicare’s New Drug Price Mandate: Healthcare & Innovation Implications. [continue reading…]

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[From my Webnote series]

See my article The Problem with Intellectual Property (Papinian Press Working Paper #2), Part III.A; also Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), ch. 14, Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,Part III.B and ch. 15, Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward, Part IV.C; Libertarian Creationism; Succinct Criticism of Utilitarianism and Libertarian Creationism. [continue reading…]

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Cancer and Copyright

From my Patents kill series. Maybe he means patents here, maybe copyright. Not sure.

From Breck Yunits, Cancer and Copyright (editor of Voices For Liberty: Essays Against Copyright and Patent Law).

Every second your body makes 2.83 million new cells. If you studied just one of those cells from a single human—sequencing all the DNA, RNA, and proteins, you would generate more data than can fit in Google, Microsoft, and Amazon’s datacenters combined. Cancer is an information problem.

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Mitosis refers to the process where a cell splits and takes about 2 hours. If you were building a startup and it was the fastest startup ever and your team doubled in size every month, you would be going at 0.0028 the speed of mitosis. Mitosis is very very fast.

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We think our information tools have gotten fast because we compare them to our old tools, but when we compare them to the challenge of mitosis and cancer they are slower than molasses.

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Copyright laws are intellectual slavery, and slow down our cancer researchers and healthcare workers to crawling speed. Because of our expanding copyright laws, our information tools are far too slow and as a result our cancer survival rates haven’t budged in a century.

Bad ideas survive far too long before evolving into good ideas in an information environment with copyright.

*

We can either cure cancer or have copyright laws. We cannot do both. Mitosis is too fast and we need our information tools to be much, much faster. We need them to be orders of magnitude faster.

Read more>>

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Voices For Liberty: Essays Against Copyright and Patent Law, compiled by Breck Yunits (2025). As explained in About page, this compilation is based in part on my own collection, Stephan Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023). Yunits’s selection contains many of those featured in my collection and also some others not included in mine. Yunits’ compilation is thus neither a subset nor superset of mine but an intersecting set. In any case, a very useful anti-IP resource.

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The China Stealing IP Myth

[From my Webnote series]

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Imaginäres Eigentum – Naturrechtliche Kritik am Geistigen „Eigentum“ (Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Stephan Kinsella), “Imaginary property: Natural law criticism of intellectual ‘property,'” Authors: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Stephan Kinsella
Compilation and translation: Manuel Barkhau.

This contains German translations of Hoppe, “The Ethics and Economics of Private Property,” in The Great Fiction, Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, plus a foreword by Manuel Barkhau (translation below).

[continue reading…]

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Koll: Jack Dorsey’s Fight Against Intellectual Monopolies

Sascha Koll, “Jack Dorseys Kampf gegen geistige Monopole,” Freiheitsfunken Funken: Libertäre Glücksschmiede (April 24, 2025) (“Jack Dorsey’s fight against intellectual monopolies: A plea for a free market of ideas”). German translation below.

Related:

[continue reading…]

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My tweet: [continue reading…]

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The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property

[From my Webnote series]

[continue reading…]

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IP is Not “Not Property”

[From my Webnote series]

See also, other posts and articles on the impossibility of “owning ideas,” including:

As I have pointed out many times, the argument against intellectual property rights is not that IP rights, or IP law, or IP itself,1 is “not property,” as many people put it, even my fellow opponents of IP.2 The question is not: are ideas (information, patterns, etc.) property or not. It’s whether IP laws are just or compatible with the fundamental or foundational libertarian principles of justice, of property rights.

And they are not. As I pointed out previously, [continue reading…]

  1. These are all distinct concepts. See Kinsella, “Intellectual Property versus Intellectual Property Rights.” As Yiannopoulos writes. “Accurate analysis should reserve the use of the word property for the designation of rights that persons have with respect to things.” And just as mind is distinct from brain, person or self is distinct from body (corpus), and a property right in a thing is distinct from the thing itself. On this latter point, see “What Libertarianism Is,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society [LFFS] (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) [LFFS]; [*** to be done:  NEW WEBNOTE ON PROPERTY, PROPERTY RIGHTS AND OWNERSHIP, AND THINGS SUBJECT TO PROPERTY RIGHTS]. []
  2. As an example, see Masnick: Creation Does Not Equal Ownership, where some Objectivist in the comments says “This is the Achilles Heel of the anti-IP claim that only stuff and never ideas can be property.” For other examples, see “Libertarian and IP Answer Man: Artificial Intelligence and IP”, “Intellectual Property versus Intellectual Property Rights,” Speaking at APEE IP Panel in Guatemala (re paper by the anti-IP Lucca Tanzillo Dos Santos, “Ideas Are Not Property: A Cross-Country Analysis of Institutions and Innovation”), Morin on Patents (2013), Munger on Property Rights in Words and Information. []
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You wouldn’t download a car!

Good parody of the stupid “you wouldn’t steal a car” and “you wouldn’t download a car” analogy to “stealing” works protected by copyright, like songs, movies, books.

Update: You wouldn’t steal a… font? Famous anti-piracy campaign from the early 2000s ‘uses pirated typeface’

Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off

[continue reading…]

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[From my Webnote series]

Actually, Kevin Carson: Intellectual Property is Theft! and Sanchez: Intellectual Property Is Theft

See my post Copying is Not A Tort.

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Regarding Musk and Dorsey: “delete all IP law”

Chamath Palihapitiya tweeted about all this.

In response, I wrote (lightly edited here):

[continue reading…]

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