This is a classic debate on intellectual property between Wendy McElroy and J. Neil Schulman† at the Libertarian Supper Club in Westwood (Los Angeles), California, in 1983. McElroy takes the anti-IP side and Schulman argues for IP. I don’t appear in this episode but I thought my listeners might find it of interest.
I wrote about this on Mises Daily, as “The Great IP Debate of 1983,” Mises Daily (July 18, 2011), which concerns the then recently-found audio of that debate, which was put up as a Mises podcast and is now also hosted at Mises.org. It’s a fascinating listen. As the Mises blurb about it reads, “In this wonderful debate, we find the whole of the theoretical apparatus of the anti-IP case presented with precision and eloquence.” This was near the beginning of the modern libertarian anti-IP movement, pioneered by McElroy and Sam Konkin (see references below).
“Introduction” and chapter “Conversation with Schulman about Logorights and Media-Carried Property” [both available here] in J. Neil Schulman, Origitent: Why Original Content is Property (Steve Heller Publishing, 2018)
Years ago I came across a fascinating series of lectures by Andrew Galambos, called V76, which focused on the significance of Thomas Paine’s thought and his crucial role in the American Revolution (and Galambos’s contention that Paine was the actual author of the Declaration of Independence, not merely its intellectual inspiration). The files had been available at this link, but have since been taken down. I recently found them at another page on the Internet Archive, which describes it thusly:
This is an open source download of a 3 session course by Andrew Galambos, delivered live in 1966, entitled ‘The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine and Your Freedom.’
Anarchist, Author, Lawyer, Electrical Engineer, Stephan Kinsella discusses the Economics and Morality of Intellectual Property with me. We’ll get into the value, subjective and objective, of Crypto-Currencies, NFTs and other Digital things.
Find out more about Stephan and dive into the large body of work he has from books to audio and video on topics from the law to economics to social issues and of course Intellectual Property at StephanKinsella.com.
Continue your trip down the Kinsella information highway at Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom where you can find a growing collection of work aimed at proving the government impedes innovation and creativity with laws and taxes and regulations and all manner of interventions into our personal and economic lives.
In my various arguments about intellectual property (IP) over the years (since I first started writing and speaking on this, in about 1995) I have gradually come up with new ways of explaining the issue, mostly in response to various criticisms and arguments I’ve seen raised on the pro-IP side. I don’t disagree with much of what I wrote in my 2001 Against Intellectual Property, though I was not hard enough on trademark and trade secret, and I probably would be more careful with the term “scarcity” since I have learned that its dual meanings are an unending source of equivocation by unscrupulous opponents (e.g. when they say “well good ideas are pretty scarce, in my opinion!”). I’ve learned a few supplementary arguments against IP or have learned different ways of making the case, that I would now include in the 2001 monograph, and which I may do someday if I write a new case against IP from scratch (a possibility; tentatively entitled Copy This Book). [continue reading…]
Apparently Facebook retroactively deleted it since it linked to c4sif.org which for some reason Fecebook now censors; I re-posted the link here. [↩]
I was an impromptu guest at the FreeTalkLive tent at PorcFest 2022 today (June 23, 2022), with host Mark Edge (and Aria) discussing corporations and limited liability, and also the recent “Reno Reset” at the Libertarian Party’s 2022 Convention in Reno.
“Thus human economy and property have a joint economic origin since both have, as the ultimate reason for their existence, the fact that goods exist whose available quantities are smaller than the requirements of men. Property, therefore, like human economy, is not an arbitrary invention but rather the only practically possible solution of the problem that is, in the nature of things, imposed upon us by the disparity between requirements for, and available quantities of, all economic goods.”
See also Heath Pearson, Origins of Law and Economics: The Economists’ New Science of Law, 1830–1930 (Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics), p. 151; and Josef Sima, “Praxeology as Law & Economics,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004), pp. 73–89, at 78.
This is my discussion with Eric John on Twitter Spaces, on June 18, 2022, about intellectual property—its genesis, common fallacies and misunderstandings, the labor theory of property, libertarian “creationism,” and so on. We discussed ownership of information and touched briefly on ownership of bitcoin.
Tom Jump, of the TJump Youtube channel, had me on to discuss anarcho-capitalism and related issues. I was not familiar with him or what position he would be coming from; turns out he’s a self-professed “centrist liberal” but was very intelligent, and surprisingly civil despite espousing some views completely contrary to libertarianism and my own beliefs.
Keith Knight has just published The Voluntaryist Handbook: A Collection of Essays, Excerpts, and Quotes (2022; pdf). As Keith notes in his Afterword, the compilation was inspired by Michael Malice’s The Anarchist Handbook, and his book contains some of the pieces I suggested in “Michael Malice’s The Anarchist Handbook: Supplemental Readings,” such as Alfred G. Cuzán’s classic “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?”, Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (excerpts), Bob Murphy, Chaos Theory (excerpts), and John Hasnas, “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” as well as my own “What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist,” and many other gems. Check it out.
This is a classic debate on intellectual property between 
This is an audio version of my article “
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