[Update: Koepsell on IP]
An interesting (and amusing) post on Leiter Reports, How Not to Respond to a Bad Book Review, led me to the work of David Koepsell, author of The Ontology of Cyberspace: Philosophy, Law, and the Future of Intellectual Property (Open Court, 2000) and Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes. (UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), and of the blog Who Owns You?, which discusses gene patents and IP law.
The Leiter Reports blog remarked on a debate between Randy Mayes and David Koepsell on human gene patents at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies site (Leiter Reports unfairly implied Koepsell had made matters worse by the way he replied to a very critical book review–I disagree with this assessment, as will be evident from my comments linked below). I ended up writing a few responses, including one posted in Are Libertarians For Intellectual Property?: Comment on David Koepsell’s “Why I Believe Gene Patenting is Wrong”; and see also Comment on Koepsell’s “A methodical response to Chris Holman’s ‘review’”.
In correspondence with him I learned Koeppsel says his theoretical background is informed by Austrians, and he has studied Menger, Mises, and Reinach and studied under Barry Smith. In his book The Ontology of Cyberspace he undermines the classifications between works of authorship and other machines, using Reinach. I’ve just ordered it.
[Mises blog cross-post]
