Dean Baker is sometimes skeptical of IP excesses,¹ though he’s no abolitionist.²

But as I said, sometimes he has a decent point when criticizing IP. For example, see his “Working Paper: Is Intellectual Property the Root of All Evil? Patents, Copyrights, and Inequality” (2018), which persuasively argues that abolishing patents would save about $827 billion annually, with some products becoming more than 90% cheaper. [continue reading…]

1. Dean Baker, Getting Ready for the Next Pandemic: Can We Get Patent Monopolies on the Table? (“We are still seeing no real debate as to whether we want to rely on these monopolies as a primary mechanism for financing medical innovation in the future.”); The Economist: Copyright Is An Antiquated Relic That Has No Place In The Digital Ages. [↩]
2. On Dean Baker’s inconsistent and confused views on IP policy, see: “$30 Billion Taxfunded Innovation Contracts: The ‘Progressive-Libertarian’ Solution”; Libertarian Favors $80 Billion Annual Tax-Funded “Medical Innovation Prize Fund”. As I noted in The Economist: Copyright Is An Antiquated Relic That Has No Place In The Digital Ages, Baker is not opposed to state-granted intellectual property, though he does toy with the idea of using taxpayer funded multibillion-dollar “artistic freedom vouchers” to promote artistic creation as some kind of improvement on copyright, and $30 billion/year in taxpayer funded subsidies for medical innovation. He’s also bad on §230 reform. Re The “Artistic Freedom Voucher” [sic]:

   As noted by Roderick Long here, “Timothy Lee writes:  ‘I can’t agree with Baker that all copyright and patent monopolies are illegitimate.’ I’m actually not sure that’s Baker’s view (in his original response Baker remarks in passing, ‘there may be areas in which patents are an effective policy for promoting innovation’).” In that exchange, Long rightly criticizes Baker’s proposal for “a system in which the government allocates a pot of money (@$30 billion a year – approximately equal to private R&D in the pharmaceutical sector) that would be awarded in long-term contracts to a relatively small number of master contractors”. I criticize this and related proposals in $30 Billion Taxfunded Innovation Contracts: The “Progressive-Libertarian” Solution. [↩]

This is included as ch. 9 of Stephan Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023).

***

Wendy McElroy has previously written about a fascinating debate on intellectual property among various anarchists in the pages of Benjamin R. Tucker’s periodical Liberty. She provides and excellent discussion of the debate in her article “Copyright and Patent in Benjamin Tucker’s Periodical,” Mises Daily (July 28, 2010), based on a chapter in Wendy McElroy, The Debates of Liberty: An Overview of Individualist Anarchism, 1881–1908 (2002), which also contains detailed endnotes and references.

As McElroy explains,

Intellectual property — as embodied in copyright and patent — was the subject of intense debate within Liberty. Benjamin Tucker flatly rejected the idea that legal copyright was compatible with anarchism. The strength of Tucker’s opposition to patents may be judged from his essay “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ [1899].

In that essay, Tucker condemned four monopolies: [continue reading…]

This is a superb article by libertarian law professor Gary Chartier, arguing that IP cannot be justified by natural law reasoning, and in fact is incompatible with natural property rights: “Intellectual Property and Natural Law,” Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy vol. 36 (2011): 58–88.¹

As he writes:

I sent Gary the following note about one part of his article (and cc’d Roderick Long and Gerard Casey who had been on an earlier email thread with me and Gary).

[continue reading…]

1. Gary informs me that an updated version of this article is incorporated into ch. 2 of his book Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society (Cambridge, 2012; online at zlib dot org). [↩]

Delivered at the Conference on Trusts of the Chicago Civic Federation, 14 September 1899. Later published as a pamphlet (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, 1903), available here and here. I’ve added some bolding to emphasize some key comments related to patent and copyright.

[continue reading…]

Fascinating series of articles about how bumbling and aggressive assertion and use of copyright law by the music industry distorted and suppressed innovation, using the Napster situation as a case study. (One of my first articles on IP was a response to the dispute between the copyright terrorists and Napster: “In Defense of Napster and Against the Second Homesteading Rule,” LewRockwell.com (Sep. 4, 2000).) Carrier’s piece is thorough and excellent, and Masnick, as usual, hits the nail on the head. Marks, an RIAA shill, is full of it.

The original paper that kicked this off is: Michael A. Carrier, “Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story,” Wis. L. Rev. (2012).

This led to three replies, and a response by Carrier, in the online version of the Wisconsin Law Review.

• Steven M. Marks, “Debunking the “Stifling Innovation” Myth: The Music Business’s Successful Transition to Digital,” Wis. L. Rev. Online (2013)
• Mike Masnick, “When You Let Incumbents Veto Innovation, You Get Less Innovation,” Wis. L. Rev. Online (May 20, 2013) (summarized in “The Aftermath Of Napster: Letting Incumbents Veto Innovation Slows Down Innovation Drastically,” Techdirt (May 29, 2013))
• Randal C. Picker, “Copyright and Innovation: Déjà Vu All Over Again,”  Wis. L. Rev. Online (2013)
• Michael A. Carrier, “Copyright and Innovation: Responses To Marks, Masnick, and Picker,” Wis. L. Rev. Online (2013).

From the introduction to Carrier’s 2012 article: [continue reading…]

To try to get the Constitution ratified, Madison and his two cronies Hamilton and Jay engaged propaganda via the Federalist Papers to try to sell the new central state they were proposing.¹ Regarding the provision authorizing patent and copyright law, he wrote in Federalist No. 43 (2):

THE FOURTH class comprises the following miscellaneous powers: 1. A power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing, for a limited time, to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. “The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors.

This is a flat-out lie. Copyright was the result of state censorship followed by the codifying Statute of Anne of 1710—that is, by legislation, not by common law.² It was not a natural right, a property right, a common law right at all.³ It’s an artificial grant of monopoly privilege by the state.⁴ [continue reading…]

1. See Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power (Aug. 3, 2009) . [↩]
2. See Karl Fogel, The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World; related talk by Fogel. Re legislation, see Another Problem with Legislation: James Carter v. the Field Codes (Oct. 14, 2009). [↩]
3. Intellectual Poverty (Jan. 6, 2011). [↩]
4. Are Patents and Copyrights “Monopolies”? (Aug. 13, 2013). [↩]

Tweet from Monica Perez about plant and seed patents:

oh yeah…they own their sterile yet rapacious genes now…so they put the gmo out there, it contaminates heirloom seeds then they can say you’re not allowed to reuse their gmos without paying again…this all comes from effing patents & copyright @NSKinsella was right all along

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