My book Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) has just been published. It has several chapters dealing with IP, to wit:

PART IV: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

14. Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society (2013)
15. Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward (2023)
16. Introduction to Origitent (2018)
17. Conversation with Schulman about Logorights and Media-Carried Property (2018)
18. Goods, Scarce and Nonscarce (2010)

PART VI: INTERVIEWS & SPEECHES

23. Stephan Kinsella on the Logic of Libertarianism and Why Intellectual Property Doesn’t Exist (2012)

Good article: Sue Donimus, “Disproving Intellectual Property.” Text pasted below.

See also Sue Donimus, “How The Free Rider & Leaker Benefit The Author” and this quote from Rothbard:

“… the free-rider argument proves far too much. After all, civilization itself is a process of all of us ‘free-riding’ on the achievements of others. We all free-ride, every day, on the achievements of Edison, Beethoven, or Vermeer.”

Murray Rothbard, “The Myth of Neutral Taxation,” also in Economic Controversies, p. 478 et pass. Discussed in KOL415: Commentary on Larken Rose, “IP: The Wrong Question”: Part 1. [continue reading…]

I’m so sick of American politicians and reporters droning on about “China is stealing our intellectual property!” without even knowing what the hell they are talking about.

From some Twitter posts:

what a crime against humanity that China is trying to … grow improved food crops. (See Aleks Phillips, “Iowa Farmers Accuse China of Stealing American Seeds,” Newsweek (Aug. 4, 2023).)

This moron on Fox News reporting on this said they were stealing “secret, patented modified seeds.” Uh, patents are public, not secret, moron. [continue reading…]

Le sigh. Almost no one can ever get quite right even their criticism of copryight. This guy opposes copyright, because he thinks this would lead to “socialized copyright” and he’s in favor of socialism, just like he’s in favor of socialized medicine. No no no. Because he’s not a libertarian, and thus has no coherent understanding of the function and nature of property rights and justice, and because he’s apparently economically illiterate (otherwise he would not favor socialized medicine), he simply can’t get the analysis right.

But, it’s to his credit he somehow dimly senses that copyright is bad.

Shownotes: “The soapbox I’ve been on for 15 years, now summarized in 17 minutes with clipart. Probably the most important video I’ll ever make. ⚠️ Rough/incomplete math warning. ”

But his argument is totally confused. He wants to “relax” the enforcement of copyright and replace it with an “automated royalty system” “managed” by the government. He proposes we phase out copyright in 5 years—but not patent, trademark, or impersonation rights! (Why not? Patents do even more damage than copyright, you unprincipled hack.)¹ And then, you cancel your spotify, netflix, disney.com, and find it all at a government-managed content server, “media.gov,” for free. Wow, the government giving us approved content! What could go wrong?

And the cost is low! He tallies up the cost of all these various services by looking at the revenues of various copyright-related industries: the royalties paid by or costs incurred by Spotify, Youtube, Netflix, Disney, the book publishing industry, to artists and creators, and so on. He comes up with $148B paid out to creators, amounting to $881 for every tax filer annually.

I mean he gets it 10% right or, being generous, 1/3 right. Not bad compared to most people but still… pretty sad. I mean at the end he says he wants a self-driving flying car. Yet he still supports the patent system, which impedes and distorts and blocks and slows down new technological innovations.

One would think a soi-disant “libertarian” would actually read up on, you know, libertarian critiques of IP,² before weighing in on it in public. But alas, in this Internet age, everyone wants to be an expert without putting in the intellectual work.

1. “Patent vs. Copyright: Which is Worse?” [↩]
2. See Kinsella, You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property: A Skeletal E-book (Papinian Press, 2023); Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property: A Skeletal E-book (Papinian Press, 2023). [↩]

Adapted from the notes for “Fritz Machlup, The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century (1850–73),” chap. 7 of Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023). [continue reading…]

I’ve discussed in previous writing the harmful effects of patents, for example on the pharmaceutical industry. (See below.)

I just came across a couple of fairly recent pieces on this topic at Mises.org:

• Gilbert Berdine, MD, “The Case Against Pharma Patent Monopolies,” Mises Wire (Nov. 13, 2018)
• Benjamin Williams, “Patents, Legal Monopolies, and the High Prices for Drugs,” Mises Wire (March 17, 2022)

Both worth a read.

For some of my own commentary on this, see: [continue reading…]

My friend David Koepsell, an attorney and philosopher who serves on the Advisory Board of C4SIF, has written and spoken a good deal on patent and copyright. Below I collect some of his essential work in this regard:

• Innovation and Nanotechnology: Converging Technologies and the End of Intellectual Property (UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011 [pdf]), esp. chaps. 5-6 (posted here with permission of the author; also, the book is published under a CC-BY-NC license; here is Bloomsbury’s free online version)
  • See also my post David Koepsell’s Innovation and Nanotechnology: Converging Technologies and the End of Intellectual Property
• “Revising Intellectual Property: Liberating Intellectual Capital,”  Innovation, Sustainability, and Development: A New Manifesto, The Hague, NL (Nov. 24 2009; slides [pdf])
• “The Ethical Case Against Intellectual Property” (slides; YouTube)
• See also my posts: David Koepsell: Another Austrian-Influenced IP Opponent and Are Libertarians For Intellectual Property?: Comment on David Koepsell’s “Why I Believe Gene Patenting is Wrong”