C4SIF.org

Related:

• Examples of Ways Content Creators Can Profit Without Intellectual Property
• IP as Contract
• The Problem with Intellectual Property
• IP Answer Man

In July 2010 I received the attached Word file via a service I used to use, YouSendIt. I just came across it in a search on my computer. I was unable to find the author at the time. I have confirmed it was Jim Cox, author of The Concise Guide To Economics. I never responded since I didn’t know who to respond to.

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See the site below based on Against Intellectual Property: Against Intellectual Property: A Stephan Kinsella Analysis: “Exploring how patent monopolies distort markets, stifle innovation, and violate genuine property rights through interactive economic modeling.”

Not sure how to describe it or what it is.

Related:

• The Problem with Intellectual Property
• The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright
• “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Patent”
• Against Intellectual Property
• Kinsella, You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023)
• Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023)
• “There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property”
• Richard Epstein’s Takings Political Theory versus Epstein’s Intellectual Property Views
• “Absurd Arguments for IP”
• USPTO/Commerce Dept. Distortions: “IP Contributes $5 Trillion and 40 Million Jobs to Economy”
• Patents: Horizontal vs Vertical Innovation
• Cato vs. Public Citizen on IP and the TPP
• KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory
• Succinct Criticism of Utilitarianism and Libertarian Creationism
• Libertarian Creationism
• 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
• Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes
• Copyright is Unconstitutional

I have often pointed out that are are no good arguments for IP. They are all absurd.¹ This includes principled/deontological/natural rights/”creationist” arguments for IP² and empirical/consequentalist/utilitarian arguments. [continue reading…]

1. “There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property”; “Absurd Arguments for IP”; USPTO/Commerce Dept. Distortions: “IP Contributes $5 Trillion and 40 Million Jobs to Economy”. [↩]
2. KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory; Succinct Criticism of Utilitarianism and Libertarian Creationism; Libertarian Creationism; 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. [↩]

Related:

• The Problem with Intellectual Property
• The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright
• Optimal Patent and Copyright Term Length
• Where did the patent term come from?
• Conversation with Sabhlok re Locke and Intellectual Property as a Natural Right or Property Right
• Sabhlok and Rogan on Intellectual Property
• KOL466 | On IP Reform and Improving IP law

From Sanjeev Sabhlok:

The final part of my piece on property rights and intellectual property has now been published by TOI:https://t.co/fNxvswYPKr

PDF containing all three parts: https://t.co/qAx2s4IwJI https://t.co/SxcBIiglCJ pic.twitter.com/iZcAKxGxhR

— Sanjeev Sabhlok (@sabhlok) September 29, 2025

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[Aug. 9, 2025]

Dear Mr. Kinsella,

I have been touching up on some of the anti-IP arguments that have been raised by libertarian theorists and you alike.

Specifically, I think the argument goes like this. [continue reading…]

Adapted from a Twitter post:

The banality of evil on full display: IP shill and buffoon Gene Quinn (https://t.co/pkD0AX0r0f) and clueless technocrat Darren Tang of WIPO (https://t.co/dW9FMao9M7) mirthfully yapping along and praising “IP as a Force for Good”. Πάτερ, ἄφες αὐτοῖς, οὐ γὰρ οἴδασιν τί…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) September 15, 2025

[continue reading…]

@witheredsummer has fed a bunch of my and others’ anti-IP writing into Google’s Notebook LM to create an AI to answer IP questions: the Anti-IP Bible. Here’s one example:

IP is bad, actually, and @NSKinsella is right in every single thing he has ever written about IP, and if you disagree you’re a socialist. pic.twitter.com/bxksLqyEFc

— Kadaververwertungsanstalt (@witheredsummer) September 12, 2025

The IP clause in the US Constitution authorizes Congress to enact patent law by authorizing it “to promote the Progress of . . . useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to . . . Inventors the exclusive Right to their . . . Discoveries.” The Patent Act does this by the so-called “patent bargain“:

The disclosure requirement lies at the heart and origin of patent law. An inventor, or the inventor’s assignee, is granted a monopoly for a given period of time in exchange for the inventor disclosing to the public how to make or practice their invention. If a patent fails to contain such information, then the bargain is violated, and the patent is unenforceable or can be revoked.

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I’ve discussed before the error of libertarian or Lockean “creationism” that underlies one of the main arguments for intellectual property. See: [continue reading…]

Below is an except from Stop Regulating Games, A Withered Remnant, by @witheredsummer:

The Real Problem: Intellectual Property

Multiple times I hinted at this before, but finally, we got here. Intellectual property is, simply put, the root of all these problems. I am not here to explain the philosophical problems of intellectual property, for that you should read Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property, and, if you’d like to learn more about the real-world impact of intellectual property, you could read my essay, Ideas Are Free: A Case Against Intellectual Property. [continue reading…]

• KOL472 | “What Is Property? And What Is Not? — Part 2 — Fireside Chat on Intellectual Property with Albert Lu,” Capitalism & Morality (Vancouver)
• KOL471 | “What Is Property? And What Is Not? — Part 1,” Capitalism & Morality (Vancouver)

From X:

Dear Mr Kinsella,

Thank you for your work in libertarianism. I have several questions for you, and I hope you have the time to check them out.

1. In your opinion, in an ideal libertarian world without state-enforced IP, how would we deal with piracy of content (movies, sports livestreams, music, etc.). Would it be purely resolved contractually? If a lot of information and entertainment is spread through code and radio waves, does that mean it cannot be ‘property’ because two people can use a radio wave or line of code without infringing on each other? What am I missing here?

[continue reading…]

Related:

• Intellectual Property and Think Tank Corruption

I’ve pointed out before how too many allegedly free market groups are pro-patent (and pro-IP in general).¹ And many were pro-vaccine and pro-lockdowns,² and of course many are not only pro-pharmaceuticals but outright shills for Big Pharma. Their support for patents is one reason many supposed free market advocates even oppose free trade in drugs and drug reimportation:³ it would undercut the monopoly prices Big Pharma is able to charge US consumers of drugs—the price is inflated not only because of unnecessary, artificial FDA costs, and because of US pharmaceutical patents, but also because FDA regulation and import controls restrict the importation of cheaper but identical drugs sold abroad for lower prices (due to local price controls or price discrimination).⁴ The Federalist Society,⁵ Cato, Independent Institute, and others, are all disappointing on IP. Independent Institute senior fellow William Shughart, for example,⁶ has embarrassingly argued: [continue reading…]

1. Intellectual Property and Think Tank Corruption. [↩]
2. Tucker, Why Elite Libertarians Failed so Miserably on COVID; What Kind of Libertarian Are You? (collecting various Cato pro-vaccine/covid lockdown views). Even my old friend Walter Block went awol on this issue, as did many others. See A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre. [↩]
3. Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto Reservation (archive); Cato on Drug Reimportation; Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto the Reservation; and Other Posts; Jude Blanchette’s The Reimportation Controversy; Protectionist Cato?; Drug Patents and Welfare; see also Epstein and Patents and Richard Epstein on “The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property”; The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property; Tabarrok and Murphy: Why Are US Drug Prices So High?; KOL469 | Haman Nature Hn 149: Tabarrok on Patents, Price Controls, and Drug Reimportation. [↩]
4. Copyright has also impeded the ability to use imports to engage in international arbitrage in the case of text books, at least until Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2013) clarified matters. [↩]
5. More defenses of IP by the Federalist Society; James Stern: Is Intellectual Property Actually Property? [Federalist Society No. 86 LECTURE]; Anti-IP Material Needed in the IP Section of the Federalist Society’s “Conservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: Annotated Bibliography”; Federalist Society Asks: What’s the Right Amount of Censorship?; Federalist Society Panel: Undermining or Preserving Property Rights? The New Administrative Patents. Though they have featured me on occasion, to their credit. Federalist Society IP Debate (Ohio State); KOL253 | Berkeley Law Federalist Society: A Libertarian’s Case Against Intellectual Property; KOL235 | Intellectual Property: A First Principles Debate (Federalist Society POLICYbrief). [↩]
6. In “Ideas Need Protection: Abolishing Intellectual-property Patents Would Hurt Innovation: A Middle Ground Is Needed” (archive). [↩]