A while back Michael Rectwald sent me this 2008 paper of his, “The Trope of “the Poor Inventor” in the British Patent Debate (and Beyond).” If I am not mistaken, this was written even before he was a libertarian. Impressive.

Abstract:

As recent scholarship on the history of invention has shown, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inventor was proposed as a plausible new hero of the industrial revolution. But the inventor has also been characterized as a creature of accident—of risk, poverty, madness, and premature death. By the 1820s, inventors were not only heroes of industry; they became its victims as well—“poor inventors” who suffered under poverty and oppression to bring forth the works of the mind. The case of the poor inventor was introduced and championed by advocates of inventive workers from the 1820s until the 1840s; the figure came to stand emblematically for working-class interests at large. By 1850, however, the ideological and rhetorical construct of the poor inventor was appropriated by a liberal, mostly middle-class lobby to affect the first reform of patent law in modern British history.

As Michael commented to me, “It’s about the figure of the “poor inventor” and how it was mobilized to effect patent law “reform.” Note that my piece isn’t about IP per se. It focuses on the rhetoric used to maintain it as against the abolitionists of the period in Britain.”

For more on this issue, see my post “Intellectual Properganda.”

Too bad he was not the Libertarian Party’s nominee this year. He would have been the first Presidential candidate in history, to my knowledge, including previous LP candidates, to oppose IP. The current nominee, Chase Oliver, seems to have some good instinctual skepticism of IP but unfortunately no coherent or principled stand against it (see my tweet re same).

Posted on Twitter (July 22, 2024); the Google auto-translate, from the Portuguese, is pasted below.

The Absurdity of Intellectual Property Laws

By: Joakim Book @joakimbook

In a previous article, I explored the absurdity of intellectual property, the unfair and inefficient monopoly privilege it confers on those experienced enough to navigate the legal system well. Because they are non-scarce and non-rival objects, like ideas or sound waves arranged in a specific order, they cannot be property economically speaking. No one can “own” vibes or reasonably punish me for using your grandmother’s recipe for beef stew. (This is also why cultural appropriation is an absurd concept.) [continue reading…]

My article “Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property” (pdf; epub; word files; Amazon; Mises Store; text below) has been published in Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella, eds., A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Sept. 20, 2024).¹ My original title was “Defamation Law and Reputation Rights as a Type of Intellectual Property” but I have simplified it.

In this article I briefly survey the modern concept of intellectual property, or IP, its four primary component rights—patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret—and how this concept and the “IP” terminology emerged. I then summarize the libertarian criticism of the main forms of IP with a focus on trademark law since it has the most similarity to defamation law and the reputation rights it protects. Next I provide the libertarian case against defamation law and reputation rights, and show similarities in the arguments for both trademark and defamation law as well as similarities in the case against both. I conclude that defamation law should be classified and treated as a type of IP and that like all forms of IP, it is illegitimate.

For previous arguments against defamation law, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Knowledge, True and False,” in The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and Walter E. Block, “The Slanderer and Libeler,” in Defending the Undefendable (2018).

[continue reading…]

1. It was originally slated to appear in Elvira Nica & Gheorghe H. Popescu, eds., A Passion for Justice: Essays in Honor of Walter Block (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, forthcoming) but was withdrawn. [↩]

Mike Masnick of TechDirt, generally pro-civil liberties and generally skeptical of copyright but not an abolitionist, just put up a podcast episode he appeared on discussing free speech versus copyright and the censorship copyright law causes. This was an episode of the podcast “Sidebar by Courthouse News” called Copyright Conundrum, and re-podcast on Techdirt by Masnick. The shownotes: [continue reading…]

“Patents, Pharma, Government: The Unholy Alliance,” Brownstone Institute (April1, 2024)

Jesus. Another confused self-proclaimed advocate of liberty advocating statist censorship in the name of intellectual property,¹ just like other so-called libertarians have advocated restricting free trade for the same reasons.²

Adam Mossoff, “Congress Should Protect the Rights of American Creators with Site-Blocking Legislation” (Feb. 14, 2023). Look how many time he equates IP with normal property rights,³ and invokes the “fruits of their productive labors” misleading metaphor. Thanks, Locke, for the huge mistake.⁴ And also, he says:

“Unfortunately, a subset of libertarians—who advocate for anarchism in the physical world and in the digital domain of the internet—have created confusion about the protection of copyrighted works on the internet.

1. Others include Reason’s moron writer Cathy Young. See, e.g., Reason: Copyright Should Last Half A Century; Libraries: Prepare to burn foreign books, courtesy copyright law; COICA: More Copyright-Backed Censorship on the Way?; “SOPA, Piracy, Censorship and the End of the Internet? Kinsella and Stefan Molyneux on Freedomain Radio”; Copyright and Free Trade; Patents and Censorship”; Copyright Censorship versus Free Speech and Human Rights; Excessive Fines and the Eighth Amendment.” [↩]
2. Such as Richard Epstein, Doug Bandow, Michael Krauss, and now, embarrassingly and pathetically, David Henderson. See Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto the Reservation; Pilon on Patents; Cato on Drug Reimportation; Cato Tugs Stray Back Onto the Reservation; and Other Posts; Intellectual Property and Think Tank Corruption. And let’s not forget William Shughart writing in favor of IP for the Independent Institute. See Independent Institute on The “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection. [↩]
3. I criticize this, e.g., in “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” Part. IV.I, in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023). [↩]
4. Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory: Transcript. [↩]
5. An Objectivist Recants on IP; Yet another Randian recants on IP; “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism.” [↩]
6. See More defenses of IP by the Federalist Society; Independent Institute on The “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection; others here.  [↩]

At Tom Woods’s wedding reception in June 2022, in Jacksonville, Florida, I ran into Mark Skousen and we ended up having a discussion about intellectual property, which we continued later in an email discussion. Gene Epstein was also included since Mark had also made some comments about IP in the aftermath of my Soho Forum debate with Richard Epstein in Nov. 2021 (which Gene Epstein hosts).

I thought my comments to Mark about IP might be of interest to some readers, to show how I sometimes respond to common queries about and arguments in favor of IP, so below I reprint a lightly edited and somewhat cleaned up version of our (casual, informal) interchange (reprinted with Mark and Gene’s permission, ‘natch). [continue reading…]