Confused “libertarian” Jan Lester¹ makes a feeble attempt to criticize some of my anti-IP arguments, in a retarded paper called “Against Against Intellectual Property: A Short Refutation of Meme Communism“.

This essay is intended to be a refutation of the main thesis in Against Intellectual Property, Kinsella 2008 (hereafter, K8). Points of agreement, relatively trivial disagreement, and irrelevant issues will largely be ignored, as will much repetition of errors in K8. Otherwise, the procedure is to go through K8 quoting various significantly erroneous parts as they arise and explaining the errors involved. It will not be necessary to respond at the same length as K8 itself.

See also

• Anarchist Libertarian Jan Lester’s Argument for Intellectual Property;
• The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists;
• Kinsella v. Schulman on Logorights and IP
• J.C. Lester: “Against Against Intellectual Property: A Short Refutation of Meme Communism”;
• “Aggression” versus “Harm” in Libertarianism

Grok: Kinsella’s Response to Lester’s Paper

Kinsella’s Response to J.C. Lester’s “Against Against Intellectual Property: A Short Refutation of Meme Communism”

Well, here we are again—it’s September 27, 2025, and J.C. Lester is still tilting at windmills with his defense of intellectual property (IP), this time in his 2019 paper “Against Against Intellectual Property: A Short Refutation of Meme Communism” (published on SSRN). As someone who’s been dismantling pro-IP arguments since the mid-1990s (see my skeletal e-book You Can’t Own Ideas, 2023, at c4sif.org), I appreciate Lester’s engagement with my work, particularly Against Intellectual Property (AIP, 2008). He’s a sharp thinker and a fellow anarchist-libertarian, but his critique misses the mark on multiple fronts. It relies on a confused ontology of ideas (what he calls “memes”), a flawed theory of “impositions” instead of aggression, and a misreading of my arguments about scarcity and property rights. Worse, it begs the question by assuming IP is property while ignoring how it aggresses against real, scarce resources.

Let me respond point by point, drawing from my critiques of Lester over the years (e.g., my 2014 post “Anarchist-Libertarian Jan Lester’s Argument for Intellectual Property” and my 2022 update “J.C. Lester: ‘Against Against Intellectual Property'”; also see parallels to my debates with J. Neil Schulman on “logorights” in my 2010 post “Kinsella v. Schulman on Logorights and IP”). I’ll reference chapters 5 (“Causation and Aggression”) and 6 (“Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society”) from my Legal Foundations of a Free Society (LFFS, 2023), as well as my 2025 monograph The Problem with Intellectual Property and my recent post “The Ontology Mistake of Libertarian Creationists” (May 2025, c4sif.org).

Lester’s Fundamental Confusion: Treating Ideas as Ownable “Objects”

Lester opens by agreeing that IP rights are in “ideal objects” (memes in Popper’s World 3) but then accuses me of confusing this with control over others’ tangible property. He says my argument—that IP gives the creator partial ownership over everyone else’s physical stuff—is a “fundamental confusion.” No, Jan—that’s exactly what IP does. As I explain in AIP (p. 15) and LFFS ch. 6, IP isn’t ownership of abstract ideas; it’s a state-granted veto over how others use their own scarce resources. If I “own” a patent on a widget design, I can sue you for building one with your materials—I’m claiming a servitude on your property. That’s not defense of an “ideal object”; it’s aggression against physical integrity.

Lester’s Popperian twist—calling memes “scarce” because they’re unique in World 3—is ontological wordplay. As I argue in “The Ontology Mistake of Libertarian Creationists” (2025), libertarians aren’t “creationists” who think property rights stem from creating value or patterns. Property rights arise from scarcity: rivalrous goods where use by one excludes others, leading to conflict. Ideas aren’t rivalrous—you using my recipe doesn’t deprive me of it. World 3 is a metaphor for objective knowledge, not a realm of scarce “objects” needing ownership. Lester’s “meme communism” jab is cute but backwards: rejecting IP isn’t forcing sharing of ideas; it’s refusing to use force to prevent peaceful emulation. IP creates artificial scarcity, like the state monopolies libertarians oppose.

His analogy—that defending IP is like defending your body or land from others’ use—fails because copying doesn’t “use” your meme in a rivalrous way. It’s not trespass; it’s learning and acting on knowledge with one’s own means. As Hoppe points out (in works like A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, 1989), rights protect physical integrity, not value or patterns (see my 2011 post “Hoppe on Property Rights in Physical Integrity vs Value”). Lester conflates the two, much like Schulman’s “logorights,” which I refuted by showing it reduces to control over others’ matter.

Begging the Question and Misreading My Arguments

Lester claims my critique is circular because I assume only physical things are property. Not so. As I clarify in LFFS ch. 2 (“What Libertarianism Is”), I start from agreed-upon scarce-resource rights (bodies, homesteaded goods) and show IP undermines them. We all agree scarce things are property; the burden is on IP advocates to justify rights in non-scarce things without conflicting with that. Lester doesn’t—he assumes memes are ownable, then defends “impositions” as non-aggressive if they don’t make others “worse off” than if the meme never existed.

This “worse off” test is question-begging and unlibertarian. In LFFS ch. 5, I distinguish aggression (uninvited border-crossing) from mere harm (e.g., competition reducing value). Lester’s “proactive imposition” blurs this: he treats emulation as an imposition because it “deprives” the creator of control or value. But as in my 2009 post “Aggression versus Harm in Libertarianism,” harm from peaceful action isn’t aggression—e.g., opening a competing store “harms” your profits but doesn’t invade your property. IP punishes emulation to protect monopoly value, not physical rights. Lester’s time-limits (until “likely independent invention”) and arbitration for “fair use” are arbitrary policy tweaks, not principled liberty.

He misreads my quote about IP giving “control over the tangible property of innumerable others” as confusing ideal rights with physical control. No— that’s the point: IP is control over others’ tangibles. His body/land analogy ignores that physical defense responds to actual invasion; IP preempts non-invasive uses.

Refuting Lester’s Specific “Corrections”

Lester quotes snippets from AIP and declares them erroneous, but his rebuttals recycle the same flaws:

• He says owning ideal rights isn’t ownership over others’ tangibles. Wrong—enforcing IP requires force against others’ bodies/property (e.g., injunctions, seizures). It’s aggression.
• On “defense” of IP: He analogizes to defending physical property. But emulation isn’t attack; it’s parallel action.
• His “meme communism” label: Rejecting IP isn’t communism—it’s refusing to grant monopolies. True communism aggresses against scarce goods; anti-IP protects them.

Lester’s conjecturalism doesn’t help: he conjectures IP minimizes impositions, but without scarcity, there’s no conflict to minimize. His approach justifies too much—e.g., banning speech that “imposes” reputational harm (defamation, which I critique as IP-like in my 2024 paper “Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property”).

Conclusion: Lester’s IP Defense Fails Libertarian Scrutiny

Lester’s paper is a valiant but flawed attempt to salvage IP under a “new libertarian paradigm.” It confuses ontology (memes as ownable) with praxeology (action over scarce means), harm with aggression, and conjecture with justification. As I noted in my 2014 and 2022 critiques, his imposition theory could ban anything “imposing” (e.g., free speech harming value), eroding liberty. IP isn’t “non-aggressive”—it’s state-backed aggression against property to enforce artificial monopolies.

For a full takedown, see my works at c4sif.org, especially LFFS chs. 5–6. Jan, if you want to hash this out further—perhaps at a PFS meeting—I’m game. Libertarians should reject IP, not reinvent it.

1. See “Aggression” versus “Harm” in Libertarianism. [↩]

Interesting master’s of philosophy thesis by one Zachary Hopper at Georgia State, in 2013.

Abstract

Thomas Pogge proposes the Health Impact Fund (HIF) as a realistic, feasible reform to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would incentivize pharmaceutical research and reward innovation for medicines based on their impact on the global burden of disease. Pogge advances a human rights-based argument to show that the HIF is a morally required addition to the current pharmaceutical patent regime. One objection to his human rights argument comes from a libertarian appeal to property rights. Pogge’s response to the libertarian leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that libertarianism is incompatible with any system of intellectual property rights. This paper will show how Pogge fails to distinguish between what I call status quo and revisionist libertarian positions on intellectual property. Making this distinction, I maintain, would strengthen the human rights argument and allow Pogge to avoid the counterintuitive conclusion of his response to the libertarian.

Related

• KOL377 | No Way Jose Ep. 140: David Friedman Debate Prep: Deontology vs. Consequentialism, Utilitarianism, Natural Rights, Argumentation Ethics, Intellectual Property
• David Friedman on the “Problem” of Piracy
• David Friedman on Copyright
• David Friedman: Current Experiments in Self Publishing
• Anthony Wile, “David D. Friedman on his Famous Father, Anarcho-Capitalism and Free-Market Solutions,” The Daily Bell (April 08, 2012)

David Friedman, a physicist by training who styles himself a legal expert and economics expert (though never practicing law and not an Austrian), and a soi-disant libertarian and anarchist even though he has no settled view on intellectual property, on IP:

Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters, chapter 11, “Clouds and Barbed Wire: The Economics of Intellectual Property.”

This is what apparently passes as “libertarian” reasoning by the physicist:

See also references and links in KOL377 | No Way Jose Ep. 140: David Friedman Debate Prep: Deontology vs. Consequentialism, Utilitarianism, Natural Rights, Argumentation Ethics, Intellectual Property; also David Friedman on the “Problem” of Piracy; David Friedman on Copyright; David Friedman: Current Experiments in Self Publishing.

This is a decent overview of arguments for and against intellectual property in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Adam Moore and Ken Himma. It’s of course too mainstream and too implicitly pro-IP, but what you gonna do.

Adam D. Moore & Kenneth Einar Himma, “Intellectual Property,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, 2011; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1980917; https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/)

A Mises post from my good friend Juan Carpio back in 2008:

IP = right to profits. Nothing more and nothing less.

Josef Sima, Stephan Kinsella, Bertrand Lemmenicier, Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey, May 20 2006

Bertrand Lemennicier (1943–2019)’s article on IP, as translated by google:

Brevets d’invention, droits de reproduction et propriété intellectuelle:

Lemmenicier, Patents, reproduction rights and intellectual property [continue reading…]

Various people have pointed me to this video since it came out two years ago.

Here’s the description:

In the litany of copyright infringement lawsuits, technology lawyer and musician Damien Riehl demonstrates that music is merely math, and has a finite number of possible melodies. If you’ve ever thought a song you like sounded similar to another, the culprit may not be an unethical forger, but rather the limited mathematical musical equations that our favorite artists have to work with. Current copyright law is at risk of severely limiting future music creation and future human creativity. This talk suggests a new way to handle these legal cases. Damien Riehl is a technology lawyer with a B.S. in music. After beginning to code in 1985, and for the web in 1995, he has worked for the chief judges of state and federal courts; litigated for a decade; taught law-school copyright classes; and led teams in software development, digital forensics, proactive cybersecurity, reactive cybersecurity incidents, and world-scale investigations. Damien’s combined experience in the law, technology, and music has inspired his most recent project—copyrighting billions of unique melodies.

[continue reading…]

See Mytheos Holt, The Bizarre Regulatory Idolatry of the Patent Lobby, TownHall (March 8, 2017), which has some good criticisms of the patent system, although it’s not clear the author is for abolishing the patent system; and the weak response by perennial IP advocate and Randian Adam Mossoff, Patents Are Property Rights, Not A “Bizarre Regulatory Lobby,” TownHall (March 13, 2017).

E.g., Mossoff writes:

To take but one example of this American approach, a Supreme Court Justice said in 1845 that “we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, . . . as much a man’s own, and as much the fruit of his honest industry, as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears.”

On the basis of this classic moral justification for all property rights — that people should have the fruits of their productive labors secured to them as their property — early American legislators and judges secured stable and effective property rights to innovators and creators.

Here we go with the ridiculous and amorphous–and Marxian–dessert-based, “fruits of one’s labor” argument. You don’t own wheat you cultivate because of labor. You own the wheat because you own the land and your labor transforms it into wheat. The labor creates wealth but not property rights. Creation is not a source of property rights, but of wealth. See, e.g., the section “Creation of Wealth versus Creation of Property” in Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright; also Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property; Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’; Succinct Criticism of Utilitarianism and Libertarian Creationism; Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors.

Related:

• Lockean Intellectual Property Refuted, Cezary Błaszczyk
• Hoppe on Intellectual Property

Interesting paper by Cezary Błaszczyk, “The Critique of Copyright in Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics,” Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, vol. 68 (2016), pp. 33–54 (PDF; Academia). Abstract:

The accurate interpretation of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics inevitably leads to the conclusion that appropriation of creative works ought to be rejected since only tangibles can and need to be owned for artistic conceptions are ideal, not-scarce (non-excludable and non-rivalrous) objects. Moreover, their ownership would inevitably lead to a conflict over titles to their exemplars. Incorporeal rights are thus inconsistent with both the praxeological axiom and absoluteness of negative rights. Hence, an attempt to introduce “artificial scarcity” through positive copyright law is unethical. It disregards the fundamental rules of any rational ethics: universality (equality before the law) and operationality (suitability for mankind survival) because it interferes with the propertarian axiom of self-ownership and the principle of non-aggression. Therefore, a property in artistic conceptions is neither rationally feasible nor indispensable and entails self-contradiction of any deontological theory based on rules of praxeology.

See also:

From V:

Dear Professor Kinsella,

I am an economics scholar in the Austrian economics tradition, I am an adherent of the libertarian outlook on life and have read many of your articles on intellectual property and decentralised law.

I was reading your book, Against Intellectual Property. The book is very clear and precise in pinning down the opposing ideas for intellectual property and showing their weakness further. The justification of property rights on the basis of scarcity is a more solid foundation than the idea of natural rights. Carl menger has the same line of thinking with regards to how it is only the scarcity of goods which makes them economic goods and leads people to economize on them, therefore That idea is also as solid as a rock but in the third chapter “IP AND PROPERTY RIGHTS” on page no 36 in the section Creation vs. Scarcity, I think you have made a remark which justifies patents as property rights… [continue reading…]

Related:

• Clif High: Copyright Is Dead “Here’s why the Moon’s priests — the parasite’s bosses — can’t hold back the AI flood”
•  Whereupon Grok admits it (and AI) is severely gimped by copyright law
• ​ Libertarian and IP Answer Man: Artificial Intelligence and IP
• Your 3D Printer Is Now a Threat to the Military-Industrial Complex: My comment: “It’s a threat to IP — the patent system . … Unless you oppose the patent system, your complaint is really hollow. “

I’ve pointed out many times that copyright is already largely unenforceable due to the Internet, torrenting, encryption—it’s easy to find copies of pirated books, music, movies, and as Cory Doctorow says, it’s never going to get harder to copy:

“It’s the twenty-first century. Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today …. Hard drives aren’t going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won’t get slower or harder to access. … Copying stuff is natural. It’s how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I’d just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet — the world’s most efficient copying machine — is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more.” —Cory Doctorow on Giving Away Free E-Books and the Morality of “Copying”

In other words, technology is helping us to evade evil copyright law, which is a good thing.

I’ve noted before that I hope something similar happens with patent law once 3D printing becomes mature enough. It will allow people to produce whatever objects they want, and easily get around any patents. 3D printing will make patent law very difficult to enforce. (I mention this in various talks, e.g. KOL231 | Let’s Talk Ethereum—Libertarianism, Anarcho-Capitalism & Blockchains; KOL346 | Copyright and Satoshi’s Legacy: The Tatiana Show, with Tatiana Moroz; KOL320 | Stephan Livera Podcast # 249–Bitcoin Patents & Open Crypto Alliance; KOL303 | Free Thought Project Podcast: IP vs. Innovation and Liberty; KOL289 | Scottish Liberty Podcast: Discussing the Mossoff-Sammeroff IP Debate, Take 2: A Sober Conversation…; and KOL253 | Berkeley Law Federalist Society: A Libertarian’s Case Against Intellectual Property. See also The IP War on 3D Printing Begins.)

I see now that Gary North has written something similar. See below. (Incidentally, he also has written about the death of copyrights: see Goodbye, Copyright. Farewell, Tenured Guilds (Feb. 15, 2016). He is somewhat confused on IP. In this piece, Chapter 39: Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks (Feb. 12, 2020), he indicates that protection of ideas—copyright and patent—are not consistent with biblical principles. He seems to oppose patent and copyright. But he is for trademark and apparently defamation law as well, which is a type of IP. So he is not against all IP, but at least, he seems to oppose the two worst types. See also Copyrights, Patents, and Ownership (Dec. 4, 2017), expressing skepticism about patent and copyright.

[Update: see When Patents Attack 3D Printing: The HangPrinter Is In Peril]

[Update: See also the Joshua M. Pearce, “An Open Source Preemptive Strike in the Coming War Over The Freedom to Make Your Own Products,” in Cosmo-Local Reader (2021):

“The relatively sudden widespread attention2,3 of the concept of distributed manufacturing with 3-D printing is largely due to the development of open-source 3-D printers. One that could make its own parts4,5, radically increased innovation rates and shrunk the costs of 3-D printers. Proprietary 3-D printers prior had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the least expensive sold for $20,000. Today an open source 3-D printer costs $160 and dozens of 3-D printers from different companies cost under $200. Several studies showed consumers could easily profit by 3-D printing their own products (even if the printers cost more than $1000).6 The number of open source designs people can make profitably for themselves is growing exponentially.7 In 2020 there are over 2.5 million 3-D printable product designs.8 As Scott Grunewald of 3D Print pointed out “the ability to fabricate just about anything at home without the need of mass production is virtually inevitable. This ability to circumvent traditional manufacturing will essentially decimate current intellectual property (IP) law and grant consumers more freedom than ever before.”9 This on the whole will benefit innovation as there is a substantial literature that argues intellectual property in general, and the patent system in particular, actually stifles innovation. 10, 11, 12, 13 ,14, 15, 16, 17, 18,19,20,21,22 Microsoft’s Bill Gates perhaps best summarizes the risks of IP: “[i]f people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”23 Broad patenting of basic ideas in a field halts major innovation and technical progress for 20 years. “But that doesn’t mean that IP lawyers or overly aggressive capitalists will pack it up and get new jobs, they will simply shift their focus on to something else that can still be patented and controlled–like 3-D printing materials.”24″]

3D Printers vs. Patents

Gary North – September 10, 2016

We know about 3D printing. It is in its primitive phase.

Think about this technology 30 years from now. Of course, your guess will look silly in retrospect — primitive.

People invent things. They apply for patents. Governments issue them. They grant a monopoly of manufacture for about 15 years. The inventor can license his invention and collect royalty payments. [continue reading…]

Excellent article on Mises.org:

Why Intellectual Property Isn’t Necessary to Reward Innovation

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TAGS Bureaucracy and Regulation

Rajshree Chandra, Knowledge as Property: Issues in the Moral Grounding of Intellectual Property Rights (Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press, 2010), p. xiv, n.1:

The basic public policy rationale for intellectual property laws is that they protect the rights of the inventor, author, or creator. IPRs have been conceived as a tool to reward innovators and creators, for their contributions to society, for a statutory period of time.They are intended to provide the necessary incentives to the generation and dissemination of knowledge as well as to encourage the transfer and diffusion of technology. IPRs constitute exceptions to market mechanisms as competition and free access were not considered adequate enough to provide incentives for innovation and development. It is typically suggested, usually by IP theory, that free market with no exclusive rights will lead to too little production of intellectual works. The economic rationale for IPRs is that unless invention or creation is compensated, invention and creation will be underprovided and economic development, even the development of science, will suffer. It is also designed to combat the ‘free rider’ problem, given that recent changes in technology have made replication and duplication much simpler. Individuals and firms will hesitate to make costly investments in innovation if imitators can reproduce these at a fraction of the cost and technological progress will be hampered.

See also Intellectual Property Advocates Hate Competition and IP Law and “Market Failure”.