Paragraph 1 (0:00-1:34): The speaker begins by engaging the audience in singing “Happy Birthday to You,” revealing afterward that it’s not actually their birthday and that performing the song publicly could be illegal due to its copyright status (1:12-1:29). This serves as an entry point to discuss the broader topic of copyright and patents, which are legal tools designed to promote innovation and creativity (1:37-1:40). The speaker emphasizes that the purpose of these systems is to ensure more innovation, with exclusive rights being merely a means to that end (1:49-2:02). They propose evaluating the intellectual property system through three questions: Is the theory valid? Does it work empirically? And is it fair? (2:13-2:32).
Paragraph 2 (1:46-4:57): The speaker critiques the theoretical flaws of intellectual property, starting with the absurdity of enforcing copyright for “Happy Birthday to You,” a song nearly a century old by deceased authors, which fails to promote creativity (2:43-3:07). They highlight the blurred line between imitation and innovation by comparing “Happy Birthday” to “Good Morning to You,” noting that the distinction between a copy and an original is problematic (3:17-4:24). This rigid separation ignores the reality that innovation often builds on imitation, creating a continuum rather than a dichotomy (4:27-4:46). Additionally, the theory overlooks the role of distributors, who profit disproportionately (e.g., Warner Music Group earning $2 million in 2008 from “Happy Birthday”) while artists receive minimal benefits (5:01-5:48).
Paragraph 3 (5:54-8:52): Turning to empirical evidence, the speaker argues that intellectual property may hinder innovation. They point to the software industry, where open-source models, free of intellectual property restrictions, consistently outperform proprietary systems like Microsoft (6:26-7:04). In healthcare, they challenge the notion that patents are essential, noting that over 90% of major medical breakthroughs occurred without intellectual property involvement (7:17-7:50). Furthermore, pharmaceutical companies often prioritize “Me Too” patents—minor tweaks to existing drugs—over groundbreaking research, misusing their monopoly power (8:01-8:46). This suggests that intellectual property may slow innovation rather than foster it.
Paragraph 4 (8:55-12:39): The speaker questions the fairness of intellectual property from an evolutionary perspective, arguing that human culture thrives on trust and the sharing of ideas, which intellectual property restricts by promoting ownership and monetization (8:55-10:13). They compare this to the flawed mercantilism system, which prioritized exports over imports, ignoring their interdependence (10:16-10:49). The impact is evident in cultural production, where 80% of 20th-century works remain locked under copyright, limiting access and creativity (10:55-11:43). The speaker advocates for a system that encourages sharing and modifying works, like playful derivatives of “Happy Birthday,” to foster innovation without fear of criminalization (11:56-12:33).
I was sightseeing earlier this week in Istanbul with my friends Greg Morin and Jay Baykal, a local. There were knockoff clothes and purses everywhere—in the Grand Bazaar, in the streets nearby, and so on. As I’ve pointed out before, trademark law is unjust.1 It prohibits the sale of goods even when the consumers are not defrauded or confused—everyone knows that they are buying imitations.
We were looking at some of the cheaper knockoffs and Jay told me that the really good ones are more expensive and are so good you can’t even tell—these are called “genuine fakes.” Great expression. Down with IP. [continue reading…]
The state regulates pharmaceuticals by laws and regulations that require prescriptions, FDA approvals, and so on. It distorts the market by regulating healthcare—inflating the price of insurance by prohibiting insurers taking into account pre-existing conditions, by tax rules that remove consumer choice from the payment, and so on. It inflates the prices of pharmaceuticals by granting patents and by imposing the huge regulatory burdens and cost of the FDA process, and by increasing demand for such pharmaceuticals from Medicare and Medicaid purchases. And then it tries to “negotiate” for lower prices, which causes much squawking.
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.
For an example of apparent “theft,” possibly contract breach, it’s not clear, see:
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]. [↩]
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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