As I mention in Classical Liberals, Libertarians, Anarchists and Others on Intellectual Property, Mark Skousen is bad on the topic of intellectual property. I know this from private correspondence with him in the wake of my Soho Forum debate (KOL364 | Soho Forum Debate vs. Richard Epstein: Patent and Copyright Law Should Be Abolished).

Now he doubles down. In a recent article for the Cobden Centre, “This Little-Known Section of the Constitution Made America the World’s #1 SuperPower,” where he rightly points out the advantages of free trade in the American “common market” stemming from language in the US Constitution, he unfortunately adds this unnecessary comment to the end: [continue reading…]

Yet more IP absurdity. But this is where the “logic” of IP leads. H/t Bob Murphy.

Does Pantone have a monopoly on colors? Is that bad?

A while back Michael Rectwald sent me this 2008 paper of his, “The Trope of “the Poor Inventor” in the British Patent Debate (and Beyond).” If I am not mistaken, this was written even before he was a libertarian. Impressive.

Abstract:

As recent scholarship on the history of invention has shown, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inventor was proposed as a plausible new hero of the industrial revolution. But the inventor has also been characterized as a creature of accident—of risk, poverty, madness, and premature death. By the 1820s, inventors were not only heroes of industry; they became its victims as well—“poor inventors” who suffered under poverty and oppression to bring forth the works of the mind. The case of the poor inventor was introduced and championed by advocates of inventive workers from the 1820s until the 1840s; the figure came to stand emblematically for working-class interests at large. By 1850, however, the ideological and rhetorical construct of the poor inventor was appropriated by a liberal, mostly middle-class lobby to affect the first reform of patent law in modern British history.

As Michael commented to me, “It’s about the figure of the “poor inventor” and how it was mobilized to effect patent law “reform.” Note that my piece isn’t about IP per se. It focuses on the rhetoric used to maintain it as against the abolitionists of the period in Britain.”

For more on this issue, see my post “Intellectual Properganda.”

Too bad he was not the Libertarian Party’s nominee this year. He would have been the first Presidential candidate in history, to my knowledge, including previous LP candidates, to oppose IP. The current nominee, Chase Oliver, seems to have some good instinctual skepticism of IP but unfortunately no coherent or principled stand against it (see my tweet re same).

Posted on Twitter (July 22, 2024); the Google auto-translate, from the Portuguese, is pasted below.

The Absurdity of Intellectual Property Laws

By: Joakim Book @joakimbook

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 as a Type of Intellectual Property” (pdf; epub; word files; Amazon; Mises Store; text below) has been published in Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella, eds., A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Sept. 20, 2024).¹ My original title was “Defamation Law and Reputation Rights as a Type of Intellectual Property” but I have simplified it.

In this article I briefly survey the modern concept of intellectual property, or IP, its four primary component rights—patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret—and how this concept and the “IP” terminology emerged. I then summarize the libertarian criticism of the main forms of IP with a focus on trademark law since it has the most similarity to defamation law and the reputation rights it protects. Next I provide the libertarian case against defamation law and reputation rights, and show similarities in the arguments for both trademark and defamation law as well as similarities in the case against both. I conclude that defamation law should be classified and treated as a type of IP and that like all forms of IP, it is illegitimate.

For previous arguments against defamation law, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Knowledge, True and False,” in The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and Walter E. Block, “The Slanderer and Libeler,” in Defending the Undefendable (2018), and more recent criticisms by Gary Chartier and Ryan McMacken (see n. 41, below). Update: see also Skyler J. Collins, “Defamation is Not Aggression, Ergo, Not a Crime,” Everything-Voluntary.com (Sep. 9, 2021); idem, “How to Deflect and Pass The Burden of Proof,” Everything-Voluntary.com (Sep. 7, 2021); idem, “Defamation Lawsuits are State-Sponsored Aggression,” Everything-Voluntary.com (May 31, 2022).

See also Block on Defamation, where I criticize a recent piece by Walter arguing for expansion of defamation law.

See also IP Proponents Do Not Even Know The Difference Between Patent, Copyright, Trademark … 

[continue reading…]

1. It 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 was withdrawn. [↩]

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…]

“Patents, Pharma, Government: The Unholy Alliance,” Brownstone Institute (April1, 2024)

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

Adam Mossoff, “Congress Should Protect the Rights of American Creators with Site-Blocking Legislation” (Feb. 14, 2023). Look how many time he equates IP with normal property rights,³ and invokes the “fruits of their productive labors” misleading metaphor. Thanks, Locke, for the huge mistake.⁴ And also, he says:

“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.

1. Others include Reason’s moron writer Cathy Young. See, e.g., Reason: Copyright Should Last Half A Century; Libraries: Prepare to burn foreign books, courtesy copyright law; COICA: More Copyright-Backed Censorship on the Way?; “SOPA, Piracy, Censorship and the End of the Internet? Kinsella and Stefan Molyneux on Freedomain Radio”; Copyright and Free Trade; Patents and Censorship”; Copyright Censorship versus Free Speech and Human Rights; Excessive Fines and the Eighth Amendment.” [↩]
2. Such as Richard Epstein, Doug Bandow, Michael Krauss, and now, embarrassingly and pathetically, David Henderson. See Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto the Reservation; Pilon on Patents; Cato on Drug Reimportation; Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto the Reservation; and Other Posts; Intellectual Property and Think Tank Corruption. And let’s not forget William Shughart writing in favor of IP for the Independent Institute. See Independent Institute on The “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection. [↩]
3. 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). [↩]
4. Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory: Transcript. [↩]
5. An Objectivist Recants on IP; Yet another Randian recants on IP; “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism.” [↩]
6. See More defenses of IP by the Federalist Society; Independent Institute on The “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection; others here.  [↩]

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…]

• See also other posts and articles on the impossibility of “owning ideas.“

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…]

1. See KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory. [↩]

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…]

For the latest in my “patents kill” series…

Apple to halt sales of some Apple Watches in US.

“The decision to take one of its most popular products off the shelf follows an ongoing dispute with medical device maker Masimo over its blood oxygen feature. Apple has routinely marketed its smartwatch as a life-saving device, which has helped launch the Apple Watch into the stratosphere, making it the most popular watch sold around the world. But its skirmish with Masimo threatens to undermine that.”

As I wrote to some friends: this is an example of how IP can kill. I mean sure, Apple ” can afford it” but … can everyone? Can Apple afford all of such things, at the margin? What about the chilling effect. So if a given watch doesn’t have an O2 monitor, out of millions of users, how many deaths might this cause? 1? 2? A half? It’s not zero. IP kills.

Andreas Von Gunten, Intellectual Property is Common Property: Arguments for the Abolition of Private Intellectual Property Rights (Zurich: buch & netz, 2015).

Abstract:

Defenders of intellectual property rights argue that these rights are justified because creators and inventors deserve compensation for their labour, because their ideas and expressions are their personal property and because the total amount of creative work and innovation increases when inventors and creators have a prospect of generating high income through the exploitation of their monopoly rights. This view is not only widely accepted by the general public, but also enforced through a very effective international legal framework. And it is endorsed by most academic researchers and commentators in this field. In this essay, I will show that the classical arguments for the justification of private intellectual property rights can be contested, and that there are many good reasons to abolish intellectual property rights completely in favour of an intellectual commons where every person is allowed to use every cultural expression and invention in whatever way he wishes. I will first give a short overview of the classical arguments for the justification of intellectual property as they are usually stated. We will then discuss the question of whether the creator or inventor deserves his de jure monopoly, by using John Christman’s categories of income and control rights to analyse property rights. The aim here is to show that it does not make sense to create control rights for abstract objects, as they are not scarce, and that there is no logical connection between the surplus which may be generated through income rights and the labour which has been put into a cultural artefact or an invention, and therefore it is not justified to grant monopoly rights on the basis of Lockean natural rights arguments for self-ownership and the just appropriation of worldly resources. As it is possible to reject Christman’s property rights categories, I will then go on to show on the basis of Richard Dawkins’ postulation of the ‘meme’ and Ludwik Fleck’s theory of the ‘thought collective’ that creative processes should be interpreted as interpersonal or collective processes, and therefore it is not justified to grant intellectual property rights to individuals on the basis of the idea that the individual who has put labour into the creative work or the invention should be the one to whom the contents of the work belong exclusively. As it is still possible to postulate the utilitarian argument that intellectual property rights are just because they increase the amount of creative works and inventions, I will argue in the last chapter that, from a libertarian as well as from an egalitarian point of view, the justification of intellectual monopoly rights on utilitarian grounds cannot be maintained. Therefore it is time to abolish the current global intellectual property law regime in favour of an intellectual commons for the good of all human beings and societies.

Have not read yet, but from the abstract, this book seems like it might have some promise. Oddly, the book it nowhere cites me though at least it cites Boldrin & Levine, and Tom Palmer.

That said, it refers to IP as “common property,” which it is not; there are no property rights at all in nonscarce things like information or ideas. The issue is not whether IP “is property” or not, or what kind of property it is¹ (which is exactly why IP proponents classify it as “intellectual” property—a type of property, but a unique one);² it is whether IP laws are justified or not. They are not. There are reasons why. It remains to be seen whether the author really understands why. Stay tuned…

Update: From ChatGPT:

prompt: summarize this book in 1-3 pages, including a detailed explanation of the auhtor’s case against IP. It is systematic and principled, and is it compable with Kinsella https://c4sif.org/2025/05/problem-with-intellectual-property-tttc-wp-2/

Summary of Intellectual Property is Common Property by Andreas von Gunten

1. Overview and Structure
The book is a systematic and principled argument against the institution of private intellectual property (IP) rights. Andreas von Gunten frames IP not as a legitimate form of property but as a state-granted monopoly that restricts the free use and exchange of information, ideas, and creative works. It moves through philosophical, economic, legal, and moral dimensions, dismantling each standard justification for IP. The style is scholarly but accessible, with philosophical reasoning backed by empirical critique.

2. The Author’s Case Against IP

(a) IP as State-Granted Monopoly
Von Gunten argues that IP rights—copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc.—do not arise naturally from property norms but are artificial monopolies enforced by the state. Unlike tangible property, which is scarce and rivalrous, IP’s objects (ideas, patterns, expressions) are non-rivalrous: multiple people can use them without depletion or exclusion. Exclusive rights over such goods inherently restrict others’ liberty to use information they have legitimately acquired.

(b) Commons Nature of Ideas
His central thesis is that intellectual creations belong to the commons. Creativity always builds on prior knowledge, culture, and shared intellectual resources. Privatizing them is an unjust enclosure of this commons. The “intellectual commons” analogy parallels environmental commons: both are resources all can draw from without depletion, and enclosure harms human flourishing.

(c) Rejection of Incentive-Based Justifications
Von Gunten critiques the incentive argument—i.e., that creators need IP protection to produce—both empirically and conceptually. He finds no strong evidence that IP laws are necessary for creativity or innovation, pointing to thriving scientific, artistic, and technological work without formal IP protection (e.g., open source). In many cases, IP distorts markets and suppresses innovation by locking up essential building blocks.

(d) Moral and Libertarian Objections
From a libertarian angle, von Gunten maintains that ownership is justified only to prevent conflict over scarce resources—not to control non-scarce goods. Enforcing IP inevitably means infringing on others’ tangible property (e.g., their own paper, computers) to prevent them from making copies, which constitutes aggression.

(e) IP as Censorship and Restriction of Freedom
IP enforcement limits how people can use their own property to express or embody ideas they have learned. This is akin to censorship, curbing free speech, education, and technological advancement.

3. Systematic and Principled Nature
The work is systematic in scope—covering law, economics, and philosophy—and principled in foundation, holding to the idea that only scarce, rivalrous goods can be justly owned. It takes each standard IP justification (natural rights, utilitarian incentive, personality theory, fairness) and dismantles it on its own terms, while anchoring the critique in libertarian principles: non-aggression, voluntary exchange, and preservation of the commons for non-scarce goods.

4. Compatibility with Kinsella’s View
Von Gunten’s framework is highly compatible with Stephan Kinsella’s anti-IP theory:

• Shared Premises: Both see IP as a state-created monopoly incompatible with legitimate property norms.

• Scarcity Principle: Both hold that real property rights exist to allocate scarce resources to avoid conflict; ideas are non-scarce and thus not ownable.

• Rights Violation in Enforcement: Both stress that IP enforcement aggresses against tangible property owners.

• Commons Language vs. Libertarian Norms: While von Gunten often uses “commons” and egalitarian framing, and Kinsella more often uses strict libertarian rights theory, the conclusions converge.

5. Conclusion
Intellectual Property is Common Property delivers a principled, multi-angle attack on IP law. It challenges both utilitarian and natural rights defenses, advocating outright abolition. The reasoning is highly consistent with Kinsella’s own, making it a strong complementary resource for those seeking a systematic libertarian case against intellectual property.

If you want, I can also make a side-by-side table comparing von Gunten’s key arguments with your own anti-IP framework so the overlaps and differences are visually clear.

Table:

1. See “What Libertarianism Is,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society, at Appendix I; see also Legal Foundations of a Free Society, p. 421. [↩]
2. See Legal Foundations of a Free Society, p. 427–30 & 427 n.77; 444 at n.11.  [↩]