[Update: According to some updates, the earlier reports were possibly somewhat inaccurate. I’m not surprised; journalists and others often mangle IP reports. I was myself wondering “gee, why don’t I see a link to a patent number”. Apparently the patentee (if it is that) didn’t “threaten” (not explicitly, anyway) and the $11k price was exaggerated. None of this affects my main point, which is the benefit of having principles. Here’s what probably happened: some Italian company had several international patents on this valve plus some kind of Italian/European version of FDA approval: “we were contacted at the end of last week for manufacturing details of a valve accessory but could not supply these due to medical manufacturing regulations”. And FDA type regulatory approval works similar to how a patent monopoly works. The bottom line is the combination of the patent system, plus the FDA-type “medical manufacturing regulations” results in some manufacturers having a quasi-monopoly on the supply of a product, which results in reduced supply and increased price. It doesn’t matter whether it’s $3 or $11k. The point is that others are generally/vaguely aware of this patent/regulatory threat, which is precisely why the doctors here were leery of reverse-engineering this valve, and why the manufacturer was leery of release to them the 3D design files, and why the good Samaritans here were leery of releasing their hacked data to other third parties. All this is caused by the patent and IP/copyright system. Without IP, 3D files would quickly be circulated and leaked; people could use and share such info without fear of liability. The IP system dissuades use of property for productive purposes; again, it is death. My judgment stands.
Update: See also Joshua M. Pearce, “A review of open source ventilators for COVID-19 and future pandemics,” F1000Research (2020), which states (citing AIP): “Putting aside the absurdity of patenting and then obstructing others from using obvious inventions in normal times, in the wake of a pandemic where millions of lives are at stake, it is intuitively obvious that this type of greed is no longer acceptable.”1 ] [continue reading…]
Abstract: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) threatens to overwhelm our medical infrastructure at the regional level causing spikes in mortality rates because of shortages of critical equipment, like ventilators. Fortunately, with the recent development and widespread deployment of small-scale manufacturing technologies like RepRap-class 3-D printers and open source microcontrollers, mass distributed manufacturing of ventilators has the potential to overcome medical supply shortages. In this study, after providing a background on ventilators, the academic literature is reviewed to find the existing and already openly-published, vetted designs for ventilators systems. These articles are analyzed to determine if the designs are open source both in spirit (license) as well as practical details (e.g. possessing accessible design source files, bill of materials, assembly instructions, wiring diagrams, firmware and software as well as operation and calibration instructions). Next, the existing Internet and gray literature are reviewed for open source ventilator projects and designs. The results of this review found that the tested and peer-reviewed systems lacked complete documentation and the open systems that were documented were either at the very early stages of design (sometimes without even a prototype) and were essentially only basically tested (if at all). With the considerably larger motivation of an ongoing pandemic, it is assumed these projects will garner greater attention and resources to make significant progress to reach a functional and easily-replicated system. There is a large amount of future work needed to move open source ventilators up to the level considered scientific-grade equipment, and even further work needed to reach medical-grade hardware. Future work is needed to achieve the potential of this approach by developing policies, updating regulations, and securing funding mechanisms for the development and testing of open source ventilators for both the current COVID19 pandemic as well as for future pandemics and for everyday use in low-resource settings. [↩]
This week, I feature my interview with Stephan Kinsella, the foremost expert on the topic of “intellectual property”. Can you own an idea? How about a word? A pattern of words? How about a color? Stephan Kinsella is here to explain why intellectual property is illegitimate. This episode will cause you to think seriously about the topic. Give it a listen. I think you’ll enjoy it!
They explain fairly well why both the rights-based or deontological case for IP makes no sense, and why the empirical case is wanting as well. As I have done also in Against Intellectual Property. They also come up with a set of proposals to improve patent and copyright, which are similar to some of my own recommendations (How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law). But despite criticizing the two cases for IP, they shy away from calling from abolition, and in their conclusion they inexplicably undercut most of their previous criticisms of IP, by conceding that some improved IP law is probably justified:
“Does this mean that the concept of “intellectual property” is completely invalid? Not necessarily. Working back from all the overreaching, there is a defensible intuition that some level of copyright and patent protection is needed to protect artists and inventors from unfair commercial exploitation of their work by parasitical imitators who add no real value of their own. And by preventing unfair exploitation, such protection would improve incentives for creation and innovation and thus promote efficiency.”1
For more information: from the Niskanen post about it:
Update: See Lindsey’s article Why intellectual property and pandemics don’t mix: “patent law, properly restrained, constitutes one important element of a well-designed national innovation system…. [↩]
Some economists would argue that any contracts voluntarily entered into should be enforced. That is what lead them to argue that, if I agree not to redistribute your book, then I should be bound by that agreement. In this view, the copyright law simply codifies the contract that sellers of embodied ideas would wish to bind their buyers to, and so saves on private transaction costs.
What do Boldrin and Levine have to say against the view that they have so aptly summarized? They make an analogy to the ban on slavery contracts, and say that this is “not only a ‘morally just’ prohibition, as many economists have argued, it is also an economically efficient one.”
For starters, I don’t see what the moral or economic problem with a slavery contract is supposed to be. Boldrin and Levine just assume the reader will agree that a slavery contract is morally offensive. Their economic case mostly consists in pointing out some disadvantages of slavery-like contracts, without giving due credit to the compensating advantages that lead such contracts to be signed despite their drawbacks.
But suppose you share the widespread view that slavery contracts are just wrong and should not be allowed. Question: Doesn’t it have something to do with the fact that a person is ceding everything they will ever have – or at least a high fraction thereof – to another person, AND will have no easy way to back out? Would you have a moral problem with a five-minute slavery contract? What if you could cancel your five-minute slavery contract for a $1 fee?
That’s about how onerous the typical copyright is. A contract not to copy the Hero System Fifth Edition core rulebook is at worst a petty inconvenience, not a daily albatross around my neck. And if I did feel oppressed, I could always sell the book, or just burn it, and I’d once again be free as a bird.
This is a short video produced by the Federalist Society (Feb. 6, 2018), featuring me and IP law professor Kristen Osenga (I had met Osenga previously, as a co-panelist at an IP panel at NYU School of Law in 2011). I was pleasantly surprised that the Federalist Society was willing to give the anti-IP side a voice—more on this below. To produce this video, Osenga and I each spoke separately, before a green screen, in studios in our own cities, for about 30 minutes. The editing that boiled this down to about 5 minutes total was superbly done.
Here comes a lot of background, just to lead up to a few final paragraphs that get to what I want to say.
As I’ve recounted before,1 I started my legal vocation and libertarian avocation2 around the same time, almost twenty-five years ago, in 1992. That year, I started practicing law, and also published my first scholarly libertarian article.3 In 1994 my wife and I moved from Houston to Philadelphia for a few years, and around that time I started attending Mises Institute and other libertarian conferences. The contacts I was making with various libertarian thinkers and organizations started to increase, partly because of the rise of email and then the Internet around that time. At the time, I would devour everything libertarian-related that I could get my hands onto—The Freeman from FEE; Liberty magazine; Reason magazine; The Free Market, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and the Review of Austrian Economics from the Mises Institute; Cato Journal; Reason Papers; Objectivity; Jeffrey Friedman’s Critical Review; various other newsletters and journals; and so on. In college I would go to the LSU library and photocopy old Ayn Rand related newsletters. In grad school in London, 1991–92, I found a copy of Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty in the University of London library. It was then out of print and hard to find. So I paid something like 10p a page to photocopy it by hand, vellum bound it, and for years that was my main marked-up copy of that classic text, until the 1998 edition was released by the Mises Institute with an amazing introduction by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.4
Yeah, I was that kind of geek. Copying Ayn Rand newsletters and Rothbard books from college libraries. But I somehow got a normal woman to marry me anyhow.
From the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, I talked with a large number of libertarian thinkers, by email, phone, in person, or even by regular snail mail. As I noted in The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory, in law school I had become fascinated by Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights. This led to my exploring related material by a number of thinkers, including libertarians like Tibor Machan and Roger Pilon.5 Hoppe had developed his argumentation ethics defense of libertarian rights, in part based on the work of his PhD advisor and mentor, the brilliant and famous (and socialist) German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and fellow German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel, along with some insights from Rothbard and Mises, plus some original insights, and a libertarian spin, by Hoppe. It was an original and brilliant new spin on libertarian rights theory that Rothbard enthusiastically adopted. Rothbard became the mentor, Hoppe his protege and intellectual colleague from the mid-1980s to Rothbard’s death in 1995.
As is too common–these authors don’t make their article public; they agree to hide it behind a publisher’s paywall, despite being paid nothing for this. Sad.
While policymakers often make bold claims as to the positive impact of intellectual property (IP) rights on both developed and developing country economies, the empirical literature is more ambiguous. IP rights have both incentive and inhibitory effects that are difficult to isolate in the abstract and are dependent on economic context. To unravel these contradictory effects, this article introduces an index that evaluates the strength of IP protection in 124 developing countries for the years 1995 to 2011. We illustrate the value of this index to economics study and show evidence that is consistent with IP leading to increased growth. Our results are further consistent with two causal pathways highlighted in the literature: that IP leads to greater levels of technology transfer and increased domestic inventive activity. Yet other aspects of our study fit uneasily with this simple story. For example, we find evidence suggesting that increased levels of growth lead to greater levels of IP protection, contradictory evidence in the literature linking IP with growth, a lack of evidence that increased levels of IP protection lead to actual use of the IP system, and problems with what IP indexes measure. Because of this, we suggest another – and so far undertheorized – explanation of the links between IP and growth: that IP may have few direct effects on growth and that any causality is a result of belief rather than actual deployment of IP.
This is my interview by Rod Rojas of the Future Gravy show, which focuses on bitcoin and blockchain topics. We discussed how patents harm innovation and various strategies some companies use to try to deal with the patent threat, such as patent pooling, defensive patent licensing, whether Blockstream’s Patent Pledge is really a tactic that makes them a patent threat to the blockchain community, and related matters.
Tucker is spot-on here. Take the title: “Knowledge Is as Valuable as Physical Capital” — actually this is what IP proponents say, they say that knowledge is as important as physical goods and therefore you need property rights in ideas just as we need it in physical things. Tucker turns it on its head and say that both knowledge and capital are important and therefore the state should not attack either: it should not tax and regulate or collectivize private capital, and it should not restrict the generation and flow and use of knowledge by IP law:
“It harms prosperity and future progress to attack private capital. In the same way, it harms prosperity and future progress to restrict information flows and their uses, through whatever means: censorship or intellectual monopolies.”
One of the greatest errors made by opponents of free economies is to disparage and attack the idea of private capital. Without capital, production is only about immediate consumption, not about building for the future. You cannot have a complex economy with advanced technology, rising wages, and many stages of production, in the absence of capital, which requires security in private property.
This is why even today you find very poor countries around the world. What has gone wrong? People are not lazy, unenterprising, uncreative, or unambitious. On the contrary, people in poor countries work harder and longer—even more creatively—than people in developed economies. What’s missing is that crucial thing: security in the cumulation of capital, intended to provide for future consumption. If you look carefully, what you find is that the state steals it (there is always some excuse) before it can be employed for social uses. [continue reading…]
See also other posts and articles on the impossibility of “owning ideas.“
(Adapted from a couple of conversations with Facebook friends.)
I’ve observed before that information is a guide to action, not a means of action. Means of action are scarce and ownable so as to prevent conflict over the use of those means. The same is not true of knowledge or information, which merely guides action.1
Another way to see this is to understand that ownership may be viewed as the right to possess or control something, and is distinct from possession or control.
Possession is actual control of a resource — “the factual authority that a person exercises over a corporeal thing,” in the words of a renowned legal scholar A.N. Yiannopoulos.2 Or as the Louisiana Civil Code puts it, “Possession is the detention or enjoyment of a corporeal thing, movable or immovable, that one holds or exercises by himself or by another who keeps or exercises it in his name.”3[continue reading…]
“Software patents have been dubious since their inception — not just in principle, but legally too. Past rulings have called their validity into serious question, and now an opinion from a prominent pro-patent judge has called for people to admit that they simply shouldn’t exist. This week, we discuss what this opinion means for the (hopefully short) future of software patents.”
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” – Thomas Jefferson
Property ownership is central to liberty and civilization. Property rights prevent conflict over the use of scarce resources. Ironically, the term “intellectual property” (aka “IP”) represents a hodgepodge of concepts that generally introduce artificial scarcity and needless conflict.
The term “intellectual property” is a biased overgeneralization that prevents clear thinking. The first step in untangling the conflated IP mess is to identify the distinct concepts that it represents. There are three main things commonly considered to be covered by the IP umbrella: copyright, patent, and trademark.
Copyright: A copyright is said to exist when a “work” is “fixed” in a “tangible medium of expression”. The creator of said “work” is granted exclusive rights of “distribution” of their “original expression”.
Patent: Patents are granted to exclude people from making, using, selling, importing, or distributing an “invention”.
Trademark: A trademark is a recognizable symbol that identifies the brand owner of a particular product or service. [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.
