I know you’re probably a busy guy, but if you have a minute or two, I’d like to get your thoughts on, or established articles about, property rights as it pertains to data as physical matter. I have started writing an article about this matter, but before I get too far along, I’d like to see if there have been others who have already tackled this. My essential consideration is how to apply a property-rights framework to the physical matter in which data is contained (EM waves, light pulses, radio, etc.). I initially came up with a simple analogy of driving your personal car along a roadway owned by Others (private or govt as the case may be) and someone physically barricading your car to be able to search it for whatever purpose (without voluntary consent). Similarly, the data we send on our phones which is transformed (homesteaded) by our labor by the use of software on our phone that digitizes the data and packages it into whatever physical EM signal is used to transmit. The data signal is the car on the road, but once that data packet is distributed by the wireless router through fiber-optic cables owned by some private entity, it has now gone onto the street and so becomes subject to some agreement between the owner of the signal and the transport media (fiber cable). Maybe what I am wondering is simply what the “fine print” user agreements amount to when agreeing to use an app. Anyway, I would appreciate any feedback at all regarding this concept, even if just a few quick points of reference or critique.
My father was born in 1934 in the East Prussian city of Königsberg. In January 1945, he escaped on one of the last ships from his besieged and later fatally destroyed hometown. He was an East Prussian through and through, and in his library he had the collected works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the Königsberg philosopher of the Enlightenment. I still remember well that my father pointed out to me–with a smile–that Kant’s original works were not entirely easy to read, but he nevertheless encouraged me to work through them; fortunately, he also helped me with references to more comprehensible secondary literature. This is how I gained a certain preformation or even a preference for the great philosopher of the Enlightenment. [continue reading…]
I have long cited David Kelley’s great 1980s lectures, the Foundations of Knowledge lecture series. It used to be sold on audiocassette by Laissez-Faire Books, as I recall; now on Youtube. These were recorded at various conferences in the 1980s, e.g. The Jefferson School Conference, San Diego, 1985; Portland Institute Conference, 1986. They include:
As an adjunct law professor, I taught Computer Law at South Texas College of Law Houston (Computer Law, 1998-99), which covered on issues such as online contracts, e-commerce, privacy, intellectual property/copyright, computer trespass, liability of ISPs for defamation or copyright infringement by users, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Y2K, antitrust, and so on. 1 Related courses taught at the time in law schools included intellectual property law and “Internet law.” (See Syllabus below.)
One topic we covered concerned state aggregations of data—when the collection of data by the state violates constitutional rights (e.g. Fourth Amendment concerns), and when it may or must or must not release data e.g. in response to FOIA requests. Two of the main cases we covered in this regard were United States Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749 (1989) and Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589 (1977). These are still apparently two key cases that factor into the current controversy about Flock cameras. [continue reading…]
Just as some critics of today’s version of “capitalism” equate it with what we libertarians or advocates of “true capitalism” would call crony capitalism—or, as Gene Epstein calls it, “crapitalism” 1 —some also criticize private property rights as a type of “theft” 2 because of “capitalist” versions of “private property rights” such as those stemming from the English Enclosure movement.
Yet as Hoppe has pointed out, there can be “partial” homesteading of land—homesteading of easements or rights-of-way, by usage—and this can be done by individuals or by groups who have been using the land—a path or street—and anyone who seeks to privatize the remainder of the land takes it subject to the pre-existing group-owned easement. After all, the key act that constitutes original appropriation is occupation (occupātiō) or use 3—using, possessing, employing a previously unused and unowned resource, according to its nature, 4 to serve as a causally efficacious means of action. Writes Hoppe: [continue reading…]
In law school I was bored and so I wrote a text-based multiple-choice adventure game based on my law school, LSU Law. I wrote it in Turbo Pascal and it at the time generated a .EXE file. Greg Morin helped me convert it to python then HTML using Claude. I was still in my Randian phase (soon to be Rothbardian anarchist) and interweaved LSU Law insider jokes with libertarian/Objectivist material and sarcasm.
Years later, when I was practicing law in Philadelphia, Nathaniel Branden somehow heard about the game and wrote me a letter asking me to send him a diskette with a copy, since it mentions Ayn Rand (the new law school Chancellor) (see one of our letters below). The snarky trans-sexual comments referred to one of our classmates who was cross-dressing in his final year to prepare for gender reassignment surgery.
The setup:
Welcome to LSU LAW–The Game.
You are a male in this game.
Here’s the hypo: a new chancellor [Ayn Rand] has taken over the LSU Law School, and she is not pleased. She is a 100% free market capitalist. Thus, she is very upset with the ultra-liberal education the students have been receiving. She has already begun eliminating the non-tenured non-capitalist professors.
Since there are too many students enrolled, Chancellor Rand has decided to expel all liberal students. Her spies are everywhere. The object of this game is to make it through a day of classes without revealing any non-capitalist views that you may hold.
Ryan McMaken, in “Why the French Revolution Was Not a Libertarian Revolution,” Mises Wire (08/20/2026), quotes Ralph Raico’s The Struggle for Liberty (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2025) to persuasively argue that the French Libertarian was not “some sort of classical liberal or libertarian revolution.” McMaken writes: it is a mistake
when modern libertarians attempt to rehabilitate the French Revolution to portray is as pro-freedom phenomenon. For example, in an essay titled “Thinking about the French Revolution,” David Boaz—a libertarian, although of the ultra-milquetoast regime-libertarian variety—lists the French Revolution among [the triumphs of liberalism.”
As Raico writes,
We further see the lack of liberalism among the revolutionaries in the fact that the French revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” is in no way as unequivocal as the American Bill of Rights. The French declaration says, for instance, there shall be freedom of thought, even for religion, “within the limits of the law.” They never got to the American point [as shown by the American Bill of Rights], which was that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Often the question is asked as to what types of acts constitute or are sufficient for homesteading (or “embordering” as Hoppe sometimes refers to it); what type of “labor” must be “mixed with” a thing; and to what property does the homesteading extend? What “counts” as “sufficient” homesteading? We can see that the answer to these questions is related to the issue of what is the thing in dispute. In other words, if B claims ownership of a thing possessed (or formerly possessed) by A, then the very framing of the dispute helps to identify what the thing is in dispute, and what counts as possession of it. If B claims ownership of a given resource, he wants the right to control it, to a certain extent, and according to its nature. Then the question becomes, did someone else previously control “it” (whatever is in dispute), according to its nature; i.e., did someone else already homestead it, so that B is only a latecomer? This ties in with de Jasay’s “let exclusion stand” principle, which rests on the idea that if someone is actually able to control a resource such that others are excluded, then this exclusion should “stand.” Of course, the physical nature of a given scarce resource and the way in which humans use such resources will determine the nature of actions needed to “control” it and exclude others.
Lecture, “Rothbard’s Revolutionary Contract Theory,” “Liberté Tribute to Rothbard on his Centenary: Rothbard 100: A Legacy for Future Generations,” Sociedad de la Libertad Latam (SdL) (a Latin American think tank based in Lima, Peru) and the 5th American Youth for Liberty Forum (Aug. 12, 2026, International Youth Day; via Youtube). Attendees included young people with a background in libertarian thought from Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico.
The speech was my English language talk interspersed with a Spanish translation by the moderator, Rosa María Apaza, Presidente SDL LATAM.
Hope you’re doing great, and I wish you a great trip to Portugal! When you have a moment, I would greatly appreciate your guidance on how to think about doxing (the public disclosure online of private or personally identifiable information about someone without their consent). I have tried finding if you have talked about it somewhere, seeing as you have pretty much mentioned everything there is to say regarding property rights and IP, but I cannot seem to find your take specifically on this. [continue reading…]
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