Every second your body makes 2.83 million new cells. If you studied just one of those cells from a single human—sequencing all the DNA, RNA, and proteins, you would generate more data than can fit in Google, Microsoft, and Amazon’s datacenters combined. Cancer is an information problem.
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Mitosis refers to the process where a cell splits and takes about 2 hours. If you were building a startup and it was the fastest startup ever and your team doubled in size every month, you would be going at 0.0028 the speed of mitosis. Mitosis is very very fast.
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We think our information tools have gotten fast because we compare them to our old tools, but when we compare them to the challenge of mitosis and cancer they are slower than molasses.
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Copyright laws are intellectual slavery, and slow down our cancer researchers and healthcare workers to crawling speed. Because of our expanding copyright laws, our information tools are far too slow and as a result our cancer survival rates haven’t budged in a century.
Bad ideas survive far too long before evolving into good ideas in an information environment with copyright.
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We can either cure cancer or have copyright laws. We cannot do both. Mitosis is too fast and we need our information tools to be much, much faster. We need them to be orders of magnitude faster.
Voices For Liberty: Essays Against Copyright and Patent Law, compiled by Breck Yunits (2025). As explained in About page, this compilation is based in part on my own collection, Stephan Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023). Yunits’s selection contains many of those featured in my collection and also some others not included in mine. Yunits’ compilation is thus neither a subset nor superset of mine but an intersecting set. In any case, a very useful anti-IP resource.
Trump’s Proclamation World Intellectual Property Day, 2025: Of course these geniuses just repeat the same nonsense about IP being “the same as” property and how infringing IP is “theft” of course they are insinuating China “steals American IP,” all of which are confused bullshit lies and distortions.
This Proclamation also explicitly admits that it is using tariffs and other trade negotiations to engage in IP imperialism: “Through the strategic use of tariffs, we are recentering our trade policy and securing stronger intellectual property protections in new and existing trade deals.”
See Kevin Duffy’s comments in Is China Guilty as Charged? | Tom Woods Show #2633, at about 19:50. Unlike most commentators, Duffy gets it right: that IP is not a legitimate property right, that IP law is unjust, and all the criticisms of China are based, in part, on the idea that China is somehow violating IP rights, and that this would be bad. It’s not, and they aren’t anyway.
Sascha Koll, “Jack Dorseys Kampf gegen geistige Monopole,” Freiheitsfunken Funken: Libertäre Glücksschmiede (April 24, 2025) (“Jack Dorsey’s fight against intellectual monopolies: A plea for a free market of ideas”). German translation below.
There are two problems here. 1. Rand simply made an honest mistake. She understandably wants to oppose (physical) aggression and thus support (physical) property rights; and I would say this insight and consistent way of seeing the symmetry in her “non-aggression principle” view…
KOL229 | Ernie Hancock Show: IP Debate with Alan Korwin: “Korwin’s Defense and Departure (49:59–1:17:42) … Korwin doubles down, arguing that copyright is a natural right, more real than physical property because it’s a unique creation.”
Demented Cato “Doctor” Wants to Strengthen Patent Law (“This Term’s alignment of rights in trademarks and copyright with traditional rights in real property is a welcome baby step (indeed, two steps) forward for the Court, which in recent years has refused to put other intellectual property rights on par with real property. One can only hope that the Court will soon explicitly tie the intellectual property rights to the law of real property. One also hopes that while doing so, the Court will take a third step in the right direction by again treating patent rights on par with real property.” Gregory Dolin, M.D., “Intellectual Property in OT 2022: Two Baby Steps in the Right Direction,” Cato Supreme Court Review 2022–2023)
Update: Penner on Intellectual Property, Monopolies, and Property: “If property is a right to things, we must provide some characterization of the things that can be property. … Most persons familiar with philosophical treatises on property are never faced with the task of thinking about why some things are objects of property and others are not.”
As I have pointed out many times, the argument against intellectual property rights is not that IP rights, or IP law, or IP itself,1 is “not property,” as many people put it, even my fellow opponents of IP.2 The question is not: are ideas (information, patterns, etc.) property or not. It’s whether IP laws are just or compatible with the fundamental or foundational libertarian principles of justice, of property rights.
These are all distinct concepts. See Kinsella, “Intellectual Property versus Intellectual Property Rights.” As Yiannopoulos writes. “Accurate analysis should reserve the use of the word property for the designation of rights that persons have with respect to things.” And just as mind is distinct from brain, person or self is distinct from body (corpus), and a property right in a thing is distinct from the thing itself. On this latter point, see “What Libertarianism Is,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society [LFFS] (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) [LFFS]; [*** to be done: NEW WEBNOTE ON PROPERTY, PROPERTY RIGHTS AND OWNERSHIP, AND THINGS SUBJECT TO PROPERTY RIGHTS]. [↩]
Good parody of the stupid “you wouldn’t steal a car” and “you wouldn’t download a car” analogy to “stealing” works protected by copyright, like songs, movies, books.
Social intercourse is facilitated by the use of words, and man uses them with freedom. If by some process it became possible for some favored portion of society to control these symbols, the normal circulation of thought would become disturbed
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.
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