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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.

Related:

• Musk and Dorsey: “delete all IP law”
• Steptoe Patent Litigator Suarez: Musk and Dorsey’s Call to ‘Delete All IP Law’ Ignores Reality
• KOL459 | Twitter Spaces: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Libertarian Property Rights, and the Case for Abolishing Intellectual Property

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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…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) April 25, 2025

My tweet: [continue reading…]

[From my Webnote series]

• The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property
• The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists
• Objectivists: “All Property is Intellectual Property”
• A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”
• Stephan Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part IV.I. In particular, references in notes 75-76 et pass.
• A Recurring Fallacy: ‘IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources’”
  • 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.”
• Richard Epstein on “The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property” (Mises 2006)
• Classifying Patent and Copyright Law as “Property”: So What?
• 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. See The China Stealing IP Myth; Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off; KOL460 | Rant about the “China is Stealing Our IP” Myth
• 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.”

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[From my Webnote series]

Related:

• Craig Wright: You Don’t Own Your Digital Stuff. NFTs Could Actually Fix That — Without Intellectual Property

See also, other posts and articles on the impossibility of “owning ideas,” including:

• Intellectual Property and the Structure of Human Action
• IP isn’t about owning ideas; those who oppose ownership of ideas are commies
• For Liberty, Life and Property….But Not The Ownership of Ideas
• Intellectual Property and the Structure of Human Action
• The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists
• See the Appendix to What Libertarianism Is: section “Concept and Definition of “Property””
• Another way to explain the problem with IP: Resources v. Knowledge; Ownership v. Possession
•  KOL395 | Selling Does Not Imply Ownership, and Vice-Versa: A Dissection (PFS 2022)
• The “If you own something, that implies that you can sell it; if you sell something, that implies you must own it first” Fallacies

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.

And they are not. As I pointed out previously, [continue reading…]

1. 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]. [↩]
2. As an example, see Masnick: Creation Does Not Equal Ownership, where some Objectivist in the comments says “This is the Achilles Heel of the anti-IP claim that only stuff and never ideas can be property.” For other examples, see “Libertarian and IP Answer Man: Artificial Intelligence and IP”, “Intellectual Property versus Intellectual Property Rights,” Speaking at APEE IP Panel in Guatemala (re paper by the anti-IP Lucca Tanzillo Dos Santos, “Ideas Are Not Property: A Cross-Country Analysis of Institutions and Innovation”), Morin on Patents (2013), Munger on Property Rights in Words and Information. Even the title of this article makes this mistake: Murray I. Franck, “Intellectual Property Rights: Are Intangibles True Property?“, IOS Journal (April 1995).  [↩]

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.

Update: You wouldn’t steal a… font? Famous anti-piracy campaign from the early 2000s ‘uses pirated typeface’

Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off

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[From my Webnote series]

Copying and competing is not stealing or theft. The truth is that IP itself is theft.

• Re the practice of attribution and credit: see Stephan Kinsella, ^“Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe: An Indispensable Framework,” in  Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press and Property and Freedom Society, 2026), in the section “Excursus: The Role of Ideas in Human Action”
• Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes
• Stop calling patent and copyright “property”; stop calling copying “theft” and “piracy”
• IP Proponents Do Not Even Know The Difference Between Patent, Copyright, Trademark … 
• All-In Podcast Concern over China and IP “Theft”
• Lacalle on China and IP “Theft”
• Gaius, Theft, and IP Infringement
• Bullard, “Is Intellectual Property Theft?”
• Oklahoma Daily Column: Intellectual Property Is Theft
• TechCentral: But, Apple, copying isn’t theft
• You wouldn’t download a car!
• 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. See The China Stealing IP Myth; The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property; KOL460 | Rant about the “China is Stealing Our IP” Myth
• On “fraud”: For my own view as to the correct way to view fraud, see Kinsella, ““A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part III.E, and “The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract,” in David Howden, ed., Palgrave Handbook of Misesian Austrian Economics (Palgrave, forthcoming 2025), section “Some Implications of the TTTC,” subsection “Fraud.”

Actually, Kevin Carson: Intellectual Property is Theft! and Sanchez: Intellectual Property Is Theft

See my post Copying is Not A Tort.

Update: See the Federalist Society forum AI Training vs. Copyright Law: Updates from the Copyright Office and the Courts, where one “Regan Smith,” a JD from Harvard no less, now Senior Vice President & General Counsel at the News/Media Alliance, and previously General Counsel and Associate Register of Copyrights at the U.S. Copyright Office, seems not to understand this at all:

That is what copyright is intended to produce to create the both the creation and the [48:52] dissemination of something. I don’t know why someone would write a book for it to be ripped off, plagiarized, and then [48:59] used to compete against them.”

Uh, no, Harvard, copyright infringement is not stealing, it’s not taking, it’s not theft, it’s not piracy, it’s not “ripping off,” it’s not “taking,” and it’s not plagiarism.

Regarding Musk and Dorsey: “delete all IP law”

Chamath Palihapitiya tweeted about all this.

Jack: “delete all IP law”
Elon: “I agree”

How could this work and where are they coming from? I don’t know exactly but here’s a guess:

In business you can view your knowledge in one of three buckets:

(A) common knowledge
(B) trade secrets
(C) IP (patents, copyrights etc)

A…

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) April 15, 2025

In response, I wrote (lightly edited here):

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[From my Webnote series]

[TO BE UPDATED… WORK IN PROGRESS…]

Too bad Cuban doesn’t oppose patents, a major cause of high drug prices (he only opposes “stupid” patents, unfortunately https://t.co/TYvuiukaSo — even EFF is totally unprincipled and doesn’t oppose IP or patents, only “abuse” … but stupid patents are not the problem, nor is… https://t.co/nVRqZAL1Wj

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) January 22, 2026

Trevor Hultner: Patent “Trolls” are Bad. Patents are Worse

Patent Trolls Are Preferable to “Practicing Entities”

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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

Click to access 08-02.pdf

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  “The Problem with Intellectual Property,” Part III.C.2.

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.

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[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

Read more>>

1. On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources [↩]

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…]

1. Musk and Dorsey: “delete all IP law” [↩]

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

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