StephanKinsella.com

J D Steelman <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 4:22 PM
Subject: Libertarian IP
To: [email protected]

It is obvious why Rand favored IP laws – to protect her writings.  Since I first began my libertarian experience in 1967 I have evolved from the limited government lib to no government lib. It is clear to me now that laws are merely scams by the ruling eltites to circumvent the functioning of free markets and free individuals.  The free private market is the best and most efficient system for satisfying goods and services demanded by consumers.  Government and its imposition of laws & regulations are designed to give (at the point of a gun) one person or class a benefit at the expense of another person or class which benefit would not otherwise exist in a private free market.

My article Intellectual Property and Libertarianism was published today in Mises Daily; a previous version, without endnotes, was published in Liberty. The article is based in part on a speech at Mises University 2009 (July 30, 2009; audio; video) and also on my What Libertarianism Is, which contains references not present in the Liberty paper (as does The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide).

see “Rand on IP, Owning “Values”, and ‘Rearrangement Rights’,”

An English translation of Adolf Reinach’s “Adolf Reinach: The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law” (1913) was included in a special edition of the journal Aletheia in 1983. I’ve scanned in my copy since it is breaking apart (it is unfortunately adorned with my underlining and notes). The scan is here [un-annotated scan sent to me by Barry Smith is here], and includes:

• John F. Crosby: A Brief Biography of Reinach ix
• Reinach as a Philosophical Personality: Edmund Husserl xi, Dietrich von Hildebrand xv, Edith Stein xxvii, Hedwig Conrad-Martius xxx
• Adolf Reinach: The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law 1
• John F. Crosby: Reinach’s Discovery of the Social Acts 143
• Discussion: 195
• Josef Seifert: Is Reinach’s “Apriorische Rechtslehre” More Important for Positive Law than Reinach Himself Thinks? 197

Reinach’s paper “On The Concept of Causality in the Criminal Law” was published earlier this year in Libertarian Papers (Vol. 1 (2009), Art. No. 35). As noted there, Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) was a German phenomenologist and legal theorist. For further information on Reinach, see Karl Schumann & Barry Smith, “Adolf Reinach: An Intellectual Biography,” in K. Mulligan, ed., Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 1–27; and “Papers on Adolf Reinach.” In addition, Reinach’s thought was examined in a symposium on “Austrian Law and Economics: The Contributions of Reinach and Rothbard” held at the Ludwig von Mises Institute on March 29–30, 2001, papers resulting from which were published in Vol. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004) of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

[Mises blog cross-post]

Update: See also Adolf Reinach, J. N. Mohanty, “Kant’s Interpretation of Hume’s Problem,” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 2, HUME ISSUE (SUMMER, 1976), pp. 161-188 (twitter: “Reinach wrote an essay that explains Hume as coherent with rationalism in the same way Mises was, a non-Kantian (i.e. non-transcendental) rationalist.”)

Powerful piece by Jeff Tucker: If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others?

November 16, 2009 7:43 AM by Mises Daily (Archive)

The MIT model is the model of the ancient world and every university environment ever since, and it is the only way to deal with a digital society in which every thought becomes globalized upon utterance. FULL ARTICLE by Jeffrey Tucker

Intel Will Pay $1.25 Billion to Settle Disputes With Rival reports: “Ending the computer industry’s most bitter legal war, the chip maker Intel agreed on Thursday to pay a rival, Advanced Micro Devices, $1.25 billion to settle antitrust and patent disputes.”

$1.25 billion in wealth transferred, and untold hundreds of millions spent on litigation, patent acquisition, losses due to strategic adjustments in response to antitrust and patent law … Yet another example of how the central state’s artificial legislative patent and antitrust schemes do nothing but destroy and waste wealth. Well, not only that–they also enrich certain classes who parasitically benefit from the system, e.g. patent lawyers, litigators, and large companies.

(See also my post Nokia’s infringement suit against Apple illustrates need to scrap US patent system.)

Update: 

Chip giant Intel agreed to pay $1.25 billion in a settlement with AMD, a step that shores up its smaller rival and may defuse the mounting antitrust scrutiny Intel faces. – Digits: AMD Lawyer Hoped For A Big Day In Court – Text: Statement from Intel, AMD on settlement – News Hub: Tech Giants Make Peace

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574531412169533976.html?mod=djemTECH

So, for a measly billion, Intel gets to basically defend itself from antitrust scrutiny. Better than paying a fine or divesting or whatever. Plus, it gets to vindicate its massive patent portfolio, which was surely used as a bargaining chip to lower the settlement amount. And AMD gets a billion, gets to stay in the game, and also gets to vindicate its IP spending and department.

Plus, both sides remain relatively free of new entrants and upstart competitors, who cannot build up patent arsenals big enough to let them enter into these negotiating games. Everybody wins, right?

In Survey of the Disruptive Impact of a First-to-File Switch, and on his facebook page, patent attorney and law professor Dennis Crouch asks “patent professionals” to “Please Respond to my Survey on Switching US Law to a First-to-File System.”

I’m trying to figure out why we should care what patent attorneys, of all people, think about patent policy. Why is there an assumption that their opinions on patent policy are especially relevant? If anything, patent professional are biased because of built-in incentives to favor maintaining a patent system. They are not objective at all. And training in engineering and law school in no way provides one with any special knowledge of policy or ethics issues. By analogy, do we care what an IRS agent thinks the tax rates should be?

Latest notable terms from this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest and Slate Political Gabfest (feel free to email me suggestions or leave them in the comments to the main page): [continue reading…]

My article “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism” [Liberty‘s online version; local PDF] was published last month in Liberty magazine (December 2009 issue). This article is based in part on a speech at Mises University 2009 (July 30, 2009; audio; video, speech podcast on The Lew Rockwell Show, #131, as The Intellectual Property Racket (Aug. 19, 2009)) and also on my What Libertarianism Is, which contains references not present in the Liberty paper (as does The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide). A version with endnotes appears here in Mises Daily.

Update: See also Yeager and Other Letters Re Liberty article “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism”, and KOL013 | “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism,” Mises University 2009.

A lot of blogposts have been flying around the libertarian blogosphere about the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago. Those looking for truly thoughtful commentary should read the article by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “De-Socialization in a United Germany,” Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1991). Hoppe applies his unparalleled abilities at libertarian and Austrian economic analysis, informed by his own experience in West Germany (including his own family’s victimization at the hands of East German communism), to provide a fantastic overview of recent German history, an Austrian-informed explanation of exactly how the East-West Germany “experiment” illustrates economic theory, a criticism of the disastrous way re-unification was to be implemented along with an explanation of the preferred alternative:

While the course has largely been set and German reunification has proceeded through the incorporation of East Germany into the West German welfare state, an alternative existed which would have spared the Germans the economic frustrations inevitably associated with the current planned course of reunification.

At the Walll, August 1990

Unfortunately, this radical alternative–the uncompromising privatization of East Germany, the adoption of a private-property constitution, and reunification through a policy of complete, unilateral free trade–has so far found practically no audience. Almost all alternatives proposed are variations of the same welfare-statist theme: either somewhat more drastic (i.e., more redistributionist), advocated mostly by Eastern economic “experts,” or somewhat more moderate, as advanced mostly by the economics establishment of West Germany.

Hoppe calls for the “complete abolition of socialism and the establishment of a pure private-property society–an anarchy of private-property owners, regulated exclusively by private-property law [, which] would be the quickest economic recovery of East Germany.”

(See also Hoppe’s discussion of East and West Germany in his A Theory of Capitalism and Socialism (1989), pp. 33-37.)

Update: from my comment to Ralph Raico’s post about his experience at Checkpoint Charlie (Ralph Raico, “My Experience at Checkpoint Charlie,” (08/15/2011); my comment)):

Checkpoint Charlie 1990

[Mises blog cross-post]

Tony Tramontana, Prairieville, Mar 18 2025

Archived comments:

Berlin, The Wall Summer 1990 — my piece of the Wall (my dad had this mounted for us)

Some more pix from that trip and related:

Chipping off a piece of the wall, 1990