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: Would you believe us if we told you copyright law is the biggest regulation on free speech in the United States? When you exercise your First Amendment right to paint a picture or write the next great American ..read more

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

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 ..read more

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 some ..read more

Duke economist Michael Munger had some comments about copyright and intellectual property (IP) and fraud, plagiarism, and related topics, in a recent AIER column, “Property in Words: Not Even Under Suspicion,” AIER (Jan. 14, 2024). He basically seems to be skeptical of the idea of copyright, based on his skepticism of words as property, but he never quite comes out and says so. In the end he comes out against dishonesty and plagiarism, but the analysis is somewhat all over the map and makes various misstatements about the nature of IP law and property rights. In general, the IP topic and prope ..read more

A friend asked me for my comments about a video with the clickbaity title “Harvard Economist Reveals Shocking SECRET About China In 2023“—in particular, regarding the third section, “Fierce Competition,” about how China handles IP vs. the U.S. My brief, dashed off response is below: Well, the title of this video makes it look click-baity. I think he is confused. Here are my thoughts just from quickly watching the first few minutes of that section. First, he is correct that competition is good for innovation. But … then why does he say “I’m not saying it’s better.” I mean yes, that is better ..read more

For the latest in my “patents kill” series… Apple to halt sales of some Apple Watches in US. “The decision to take one of its most popular products off the shelf follows an ongoing dispute with medical device maker Masimo over its blood oxygen feature. Apple has routinely marketed its smartwatch as a life-saving device, which has helped launch the Apple Watch into the stratosphere, making it the most popular watch sold around the world. But its skirmish with Masimo threatens to undermine that.” As I wrote to some friends: this is an example of how IP can kill. I mean sure, Apple ” can afford ..read more

Andreas Von Gunten, Intellectual Property is Common Property: Arguments for the Abolition of Private Intellectual Property Rights (Zurich: buch & netz, 2015). Abstract: Defenders of intellectual property rights argue that these rights are justified because creators and inventors deserve compensation for their labour, because their ideas and expressions are their personal property and because the total amount of creative work and innovation increases when inventors and creators have a prospect of generating high income through the exploitation of their monopoly rights. This view is not onl ..read more

I’ve bemoaned stupid arguments for IP for a long time,1 one of which is, when I point out that property rights apply only to scarce (that is, rivalrous) resources,2 you hear the retort, “Well, shucks, it seems to me that good ideas is pretty scarce!”3  Equivocating on different senses of scarce: to mean rivalrous, on the one hand, for economic and political discourse; or to mean not abundant, in colloquial terms. Thus, to counter this tedious disingenuous and semantical/equivocational argument, I tend to use the term rivalrous, or sometimes “conflictable,” to focus on the aspect of things ..read more

From an old discussion thread on Ed Ucation, “Intellectual Property: As usual, Rothbard gets it right,” Economic Policy Journal. Comment by Conza (Michael Conaghan): The latest Rothbard commentary on IP outdating all of the above. Note the intellectual honesty. Note the admission of seeking further commentary. Note the request for more information. Note the shattering of your position that Rothbard saw copyright in perpetuity. “…Finally, there is the almost incredible harassment of VCR owners. If I buy a VCR and a blank tape, I should be able to tape a movie or other program off my own TV set ..read more