[From my Webnote series]
[TO BE UPDATED… WORK IN PROGRESS…]
Trevor Hultner: Patent “Trolls” are Bad. Patents are Worse
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
—Liberty, 1891
https://x.com/breckyunits/status/1914420110346829995
from https://c4sif.org/2022/07/benjamin-tucker-and-the-great-nineteenth-century-ip-debates-in-liberty-magazine/
[From my Webnote series]
See: Stephan Kinsella, “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part III.C.
Also: Penner on Intellectual Property, Monopolies, and Property: recognizes IP rights as protected by law are “not rights in personam, but rights against the whole world“—i.e., in rem rights.
[From my Webnote series]
From a twitter post. Kinsella on fie-ya.
This is why I use conflictability (or rivalrousness) instead of scarcity,1 since the latter term is ambiguous and has different connotations. In common usage it just means lack of abundance. In terms of praxeology and property rights it means the opposite of…
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) April 19, 2025
In the wake of Jack Dorsey’s and Elon Musk’s recent criticism of intellectual property (IP) law,1 it’s no surprise the usual suspects—vested interests, IP attorneys—are pushing back. Case in point is a Bloomberg Law article by Christopher Suarez, an IP litigator with Steptoe, “Musk and Dorsey’s Call to ‘Delete All IP Law’ Ignores Reality,” Bloomberg Law (April 18, 2025). But it’s of the same old confusions and myths and provides no coherent argument in favor of IP law, especially its two most harmful forms, patent and copyright.
Doing a complete fisking would merely illustrate Brandolini’s Law, so I’ll just mention a few things. [continue reading…]
I have written an article to summarise what has happened over the past 3 years with the oppositions Arthur van Pelt and I have been doing against 3 of Craig “Faketoshi” Wright’s patents. The score is 3-0 but will this change on appeal? We have to wait to find out.
Link below. pic.twitter.com/t0ekXWcP9o— Tufty Sylvestris (@tuftythecat) April 18, 2025
It is easy to see that the patent for invention is a privilege and an industrial monopoly, of the same family as those of the Middle Ages which were abolished immediately after 1789.
Il est facile de voir que le brevet d’invention est un privilège et un monopole industriel, de la même famille que ceux du moyen âge qu’on a abolis immédiatement après 1789. —Michel Chevalier
From Stéphane Geyres’s tweet:
Il est facile de voir que le brevet d’invention est un privilège et un monopole industriel, de la même famille que ceux du moyen âge qu’on a abolis immédiatement après 1789.
Michel Chevalier
(@NSKinsella : a gift from long ago) pic.twitter.com/G0llX610ME— Stéphane Geyres (@StephaneGeyres) April 18, 2025
From Michel Chevalier et les brevets d’invention (Treaty of Invention Patents and Industrial Counterfeiting); Traité des brevets d’invention et de la contrefaçon industrielle, précédé d’une théorie sur les inventions industrielles; Gallica version. See also: Michel Chevalier (Wikipedia); Louis Rouanet, “Michel Chevalier’s Forgotten Case Against the Patent System,” Libertarian Papers 7 (1) (2015): 73–94.
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (10.8MB)
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 460.
I mean the title says it all. I kept getting interrupted by calls and deliveries. Oh well, what you gonna do.
Excerpt from this 2009 article:
Control freak
One striking feature of Objectivism is it outspoken support of intellectual property. A key scene in Atlas Shrugged is where metallurgist genius Hank Rearden is compelled by the government to hand over his intellectual rights to his innovative metal alloy, and Ayn Rand acted in kind. She passionately used the copyright on her works to bar people from forming “John Galt Societies”, citing that the name John Galt is her creation and her intellectual property.For a person bent on propagating her ideas to the maximum extent possible, this would seem eerily counterproductive. Stealing an object from someone is obviously depriving the original owner of his property, but copying it isn’t. It may or may not be harmful to potential income, but that income remains potential, in the realm of the unprovable. This is a debate that incites extreme passion.
While Objectivists, libertarians and conservatives strongly agree on the principle of physical property rights, the picture is much more divided when it comes to ‘intellectual property’, a catch-all phrase for several different items, including patents, copyright and trademarks. In a landmark essay by Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, argues that ‘Intellectual property’ is not only meaningless and harmful, it is in direct violation of the general principle of private property, and primarily constitutes a state-sanctioned creation of artificial scarcity, leading ultimately to poverty, not job creation and wealth.
The wider libertarian movement accepted the argument, put it into action (see www.mises.org/books) and moved on. Objectivists, on the other hand, maintain that what Ayn Rand spoke and practiced on the subject remains the unalterable truth.
A commentary on and summary of Contre la Propriété Intellectuelle, a French translation of Against Intellectual Property, by Marius-Joseph Marchetti, has been published here: Contre la propriété intellectuelle : un essai éclairant [Part 1], and Part 2. The Google auto-translation is appended below, with light edits.
Against Intellectual Property: An Enlightening Essay
By Marius-Joseph Marchetti
August 7, 2019
Let’s dive into a quality libertarian work: Against Intellectual Property by N. Stephen Kinsella (and translated into French by Stéphane Geyres and Daivy Merlijs). The 76-page book aims to fulfill several roles, which it fulfills very well. It is divided into four parts, each essential for having an overall vision of intellectual property. [continue reading…]
Re Examples of Ways Content Creators Can Profit Without Intellectual Property and Conversation with an author about copyright and publishing in a free society … God I tire of this. It’s a never-ending littany or series of questions. It never ends. No one can think in principled terms.
As I noted previously,1
Just one follow up question: If you can, could you give an idea of how the “creative industries” might operate in a world without copyright and intellectual property? I.e. how would things like films and television, which require significant capital investment, be funded and ultimately constitute a profitable enterprise outside the current paradigm where copyright owners profit from selling copyrighted material/from royalties? Would the “creative industries”, as we know them today, even exist?
To me that seems to be the sticking point for many people — they might admit the principled objections to copyright and IP, but can’t get their head around how cultural content would be made without copyright. I’m not sure I fully grasp it myself. [continue reading…]
- Conversation with a Student about Australian Copyright Reform, Piracy, and Innovation and Creation in a Copyright-Free World. [↩]
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 459.
In response to lots of froth on Twitter related to Jack Dorsey’s call to “delete all IP law,” which was echoed by Elon Musk (Musk and Dorsey: “delete all IP law”) I decided to attempt to host an impromptu Twitter Spaces about this. After overcoming some technical glitches, here is the result (and thanks to @Brunopbch, @NotGovernor (Patrick Smith), and @TrueAmPatriot86 for assists). I proposed to the space: “Fielding Questions About Abolishing Intellectual Property, about IP, and About Libertarian Property Rights”, and that’s basically what we ended up talking about. The Twitter spaces can be viewed here; I have clipped off the first 8 minutes or so of setup talk for this podcast episode.
About 15 years ago one Russell Madden was angry with my anti-IP article “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism,” so he emailed me a suspiciously similar version, but with “his name” “slapped on” it, titled “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism, by Russell Madden.” His accompanying note said, “SURE. NO SUCH THING AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY…” So, to be helpful, I published it for him, on my own site.1 After all, maybe the poor fella didn’t have a site or way to publish his intriguing anti-IP article!
Well now, pro-copyright author J.P. Chandler tells me he is also wants to publish a book called Legal Foundations of a Free Society—hey, that’s the same title as mine! [continue reading…]
- Russell Madden’s “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism”; “Oh yeah? How would like it if I copy and publish your book under my name?!”: On IP Hypocrisy and Calling the Smartasses’ Bluffs.” [↩]
One of the greatest opponents of IP1 is my friend and comrade-in-arms Jeff Tucker. See:
- Tucker and Kinsella, “Goods, Scarce and Nonscarce,” in Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)
From It’s a Jetsons World (Mises Institute, 2012): [continue reading…]
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