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

My friend Tibor Machan presents a fascinating and excellent lecture on “Thoughts on Objectivism and Ayn Rand” at the Libertarian Alliance Conference in October 2009 in London. I enjoyed in partiuclar Machan’s discussion of how many of Rand’s technical philosophical views–on volition, epistemology, and so on–were similar to perhaps more sophisticated treatments by mainstream philosophers such as Austin, Sperry, and so on.

(Tibor is introduced by my friend Sean Gabb; Gabb’s video record of the proceedings of the conference. Gabb, a regular at Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s Property and Freedom Society meetings (see his The Third Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, May 2008: A Brief Record; The Second Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society; The Inaugural Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: An Incidental Record), also contributed the chapter “Hans-Hermann Hoppe and the Political Equivalent of Nuclear Fusion” to Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.)

Someone asked me what books I had and what my office (at work) looked like. I snapped a few pix with my i-fizzy, which I put on this SmugMug gallery; a slideshow is below (and here’s a SmugMug gallery showing only my own book covers).

Here’s the little video from that gallery:

A quick tour of the laser fab:

Related:

• “F*ck you, Milton Friedman”

From Mises blog; archived comments below.

In a blog post here a few years ago (Friedman and Socialism), I mentioned a July 1991 Liberty article by Friedman that I remembered where he said he was in favor of liberty and tolerance of differing views and behavior because we cannot know that the behavior we want to outlaw is really bad. In other words, the reason we should not censor dissenting ideas is not the standard libertarian idea that holding or speaking is not aggression, but because then we can’t be sure the ideas are wrong. This implies that if we could know for sure what is right and wrong, it might be okay to legislate morality, to outlaw immoral or “bad” actions.

I’ve finally located a copy of the article, “Say ‘No’ to Intolerance” (full issue here). In this article, Friedman writes: [continue reading…]

One of the things I have always liked about Objectivism was its moral defense of economic and personal liberty. The objection to antitrust law, for example, is based on the right to engage in non-aggressive action, including attempts at collusion and price-fixing, say. It’s not based on the economic case against antitrust law. Similarly, there is a right not to give to charity, a right to discriminate in one’s business, and so on–even if we can expect people to be charitable and for irrational discrimination to be penalized and wither away on the free market; the case for these rights is not dependent on these subsidiary observations. It’s principled, not consequentialist.

Thus I was a bit surprised to hear Leonard Peikoff, in his latest podcast (no. 87, around 9:00), provide an argument for personal liberty similar to that of Milton Friedman’s flawed rationale for being libertarian. As I noted in Friedman and Socialism (and alluded to in n. 53 of Hoppe’s “The Western State as a Paradigm: Learning from History“): [continue reading…]

[From my Webnote series]

No one knows. L. Neil Smith estimates in the piece below we’d be at least eight times richer.

Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision

or

I Dreamed I Was a Signatory In My Maidenform Bra

by L. Neil Smith

The relative invisibility of Libertarianism after 40 years of backbreaking, heartbreaking labor, has little to do with any lack of money, ideas, personnel, or anything else Libertarians may occasionally whine about. It isn’t the fault of an evil northeastern Liberal conspiracy. Nor, as the more timid among us often recommend, is it reason to tone down Libertarian rhetoric, to soften principle or its expression, to make it more conservative or “practical” in approach. All of that has been tried, again & again. [continue reading…]

From Mises blog: